Chasing prestige will lead ambitious people astray
Programmer and startup founder Paul Graham says unglamorous work kept him on the right track and away from the desire to impress.
paulgraham.com · What I Worked OnPaul Graham, a programmer and painter who went on to co-found the online store company Viaweb and the startup funder Y Combinator, arrived at the idea after years of zigzags between code, art, and essays. Looking back on projects that had once seemed lame, he noticed how often the unfashionable choice had served him well.
His version of the lesson is blunt. "Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious," he argues. "If anything is going to lead you astray, it will be the desire to impress people."
He says he first learned the business form of that lesson as a programmer at Interleaf, a maker of document software. There he concluded that companies should welcome modest, beginner customers instead of chasing status. If you leave the cheap end open, he argues, a competitor can claim it and, in his words, "squash you against the ceiling." As Graham puts it: "the low end eats the high end," and "prestige is a danger sign."
Viaweb was his test of the principle. He and his co-founders were determined, he says, to be the Microsoft Word of online commerce, not the Interleaf: easy to use and inexpensive. Being poor helped. They charged $100 a month for a small store and $300 a month for a large one, a price competitors hated, not from clever strategy but because $300 felt like a fortune to Graham and his co-founders, who did not know what companies usually spent.
The pattern kept repeating, he argues. As Graham notes, "Still life has always been the least prestigious form of painting," and "Viaweb and Y Combinator both seemed lame when we started them." When strangers asked what he was writing and he said an essay for his website, he got a glassy-eyed look, and even Lisp, an old programming language that is intellectually prestigious the way Latin is, did not seem hip.
He is careful not to claim that obscurity alone makes work good. But when you are drawn to unprestigious work anyway, he believes, it is a sign there is something real to discover there, and that your motives are right.
Questions people ask
What does "the low end eats the high end" mean in business?
It means a cheaper, simpler product that serves beginners or small customers can improve over time and take customers from expensive incumbents. The low-end product wins on price, ease of use, and volume, then moves upmarket. Clayton Christensen described the same pattern as disruptive innovation in The Innovator's Dilemma.
Why does Graham compare Lisp to Latin?
Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages, invented by John McCarthy around 1960, and it introduced ideas like conditionals, recursion, and garbage collection that shaped later languages. Like Latin, it is respected by scholars and no longer widely spoken in everyday work. Most working programmers today use descendants such as Python, JavaScript, or Ruby.
What was Interleaf, and why did Graham want to be the opposite of it?
Interleaf was a 1980s and 1990s company that sold expensive, complex software for creating technical documents, often running on specialized workstations. It served large corporate customers and required training and support. Graham wanted Viaweb to be like Microsoft Word instead: cheap, simple enough for a small shop owner to use, and available without special hardware.