COBOL
product on 22 shows · 12 statements across 12 episodes · said 68 times in 40 episodes since 2016
the a16z Podcast 18 
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 6 
TBPN 5 
20VC 5 
No Priors 4 
All-In 4 
Innovators & Investors 3 
Top Founders 3 
Acquired 2 
Another Podcast 2 
Latent Space 2 
A Product Market Fit Show 2 
Capital Allocators 2 
How I Built This 2 
Startups For the Rest of Us 1 
Lenny's Podcast 1 
the Neon Show 1 
Invest Like the Best 1 
Sourcery 1 
Catalyst 1 
the Green Blueprint 1 
Big Technology 1
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 18the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 620VC 5TBPN 5All-In 4No Priors 4Top Founders 3Innovators & Investors 314 more shows
2026 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2025 18 mentions in 14 episodes 1 per episode
- Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI · Y Combinator
- Unlocking Legacy Systems: Modernizing Mainframes via AI with Mechanical Orchard
- Looking for AI strategies
- No Priors Ep 106 | With GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke
- How his AI-first services company grew $0 to $40M ARR in one year. | Eric Foster, Founder of Tenex · PMF Show
- He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5M ARR in just 12 months. | G... · PMF Show
- Inside the Trillion-Dollar AI Buildout | Dylan Patel Interview · Invest Like The Best
- AI in Wealth Management: Scaling Financial Advisory & Democratizing Access
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 8 mentions in 6 episodes 1 per episode
- Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- GitHub CEO Thomas Domke -- The One-Person, Billion-Dollar Startup
- Mario Schlosser: "How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap" | E1136 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Blythe Masters - Fintech Innovation at Motive Partners (EP.376)
- The Four Wars of the AI Stack - Dec 2023 Recap
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 10 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Big Ideas 2024: The Rise of the Developer as a Buyer in Financial Services with Angela Strange
- No Priors Ep. 23 | With Snowflake's CEO Frank Slootman
- Making sense of advanced nuclear’s stumbles
- Episode 661 | Millions in Revenue As a One-Person Software Compan...
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2021 10 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- The Open Source Movement in Fintech
- Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender
- Resurface Is On Prem API Management for HealthCare, $5k/year per Managed Node, $2m Raised
- Slintel Breaks $6m ARR, $20m Raise on $100m Valuation Ready to Take on B2B Intelligence Space
- Chris Dixon – The Future of Blockchain at a16z (Capital Allocators, EP.172)
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2019 9 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
2018 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
12 statements about COBOL, every show
Armstrong: Legacy finance relies on outdated 1990s COBOL mainframe code
“Our financial system is the legacy financial system is it's slow. It's creaky. It's old. You know, in many cases it's built on code that was written like in the nineties and COBOL and like these kind of mainframe computers. And a lot of that stuff just Hasn't …”
Calacanis: COBOL code runs 95% of US ATMs and Social Security payments
“It runs 95% of ATMs in the US, and it powers Social Security payments.”
Rabois: Incumbent banks run on COBOL and have zero software talent draw
“And the incumbents can't do this. They, they're still like literally in COBOL often, and their ability to attract talent is just like zero.”
Hieatt: Gartner Estimates 250B to 750B Lines of Active Production COBOL
“There's an estimate from Gartner that there are between 257 hundred and fifty billion lines of COBOL in the world running in production, right? If you can imagine, like, some dollar per line of code fee on average, right, that, that's a big term.”
Bornstein: AI cannot solve legacy code migration due to lost context
“AI may be able to transpile, you know, COBOL to Java, but there's a huge amount of context in what went into creating that COBOL code that's been totally lost, right?”
Masad: Sears skipped traditional SaaS to directly build internal AI tools
“About a year ago they hired a team to Like a more trendy sort of tech team to get them off of Cobalt, which is whatever a hundred year old program language. And they were able to do it very quickly. And then after they'd done that, you know, basically most, mo…”
Dohmke: Developers will maintain legacy PHP and COBOL for a decade
“And so we are still I think for like a decade or so at least going to have software developers that work in, in lots of old school, you know, PHP code and COBOL code and all that stuff.”
Strange: LLMs will automatically translate legacy COBOL code into modern languages
“You can imagine a world where LLMs get so good that you could feed in large portions of code written in COBOL, And they would spit out the same amount of code or the same functionality of said code in a different language, you know, and we're not there yet, bu…”
Mike Perham: Legacy technologies like Fortran and COBOL still generate unseen profits
“I also look at tech like Fortran or COBOL, right, that have been, like, in existence for going on 6070 years now. And they're still out there. There's still people making money off of it. You just don't hear about it.”
Sinofsky: One US government branch relies on 7M lines of COBOL
“We met with a government agency this week, and they have one application for one branch for one scenario with seven million lines of COBOL code.”
Schlosser: Healthcare incumbents cannot easily innovate due to legacy COBOL code
“If you come into this by having first and foremost in your DNA that you want to serve members and create the best experience for them, get their costs down, you suddenly start developing new technology and products. That the other guys will not get around to d…”