Show Your Value with Lee Benson
Oct 7, 2026 · 1 hr · 10 segments
Mike Zisman wrote his first program in 1967. He built and sold Soft Switch to Lotus, then watched IBM take over Lotus eleven months later, going from a company of 450 people to one of 250,000 in under…
Mike ZismanGuestLee BensonHostI've built a lot of software over the years, even the entire ERP for the aerospace business.
And, and, uh, and then business management operating system software through my company, ETW, built all of that, spent a lot of money on it, and now you can literally go ten to thirty times faster at ten to thirty times less cost.
It's like we decide what we want, AI seems to Be pretty good at doing the work, but there still has to be human accountability and verification at the end of it.
Um, what do you think about this transition? I love the tool, but it still needs human accountability all around it.
And, and I think the, the, the computing world really started in nineteen sixty-four when IBM introduced the System three sixty, right? That's what made computers proliferate in business.
I mean, we obviously had ENIAC where I went to Penn, you know, shortly after the war.
So you can say, well, that really went back to the late forties, but in reality it was sixty-four whe-when Watson made a huge bet on IBM on, on System three sixty.
And so I didn't realize I was there at the beginning, and I've grown up with it.
How, how much, how could you be more lucky than starting in this business in sixty-seven and seeing how it's evolved to twenty-six? Now, getting to your question, the way I think about it is in the early days, very early days, people coded in machine language, ones and zeros.
I've built a lot of software over the years, even the entire ERP for the aerospace business.
And, and, uh, and then business management operating system software through my company, ETW, built all of that, spent a lot of money on it, and now you can literally go ten to thirty times faster at ten to thirty times less cost.
It's like we decide what we want, AI seems to Be pretty good at doing the work, but there still has to be human accountability and verification at the end of it.
Um, what do you think about this transition? I love the tool, but it still needs human accountability all around it.
And, and I think the, the, the computing world really started in nineteen sixty-four when IBM introduced the System three sixty, right? That's what made computers proliferate in business.
I mean, we obviously had ENIAC where I went to Penn, you know, shortly after the war.
So you can say, well, that really went back to the late forties, but in reality it was sixty-four whe-when Watson made a huge bet on IBM on, on System three sixty.
And so I didn't realize I was there at the beginning, and I've grown up with it.
How, how much, how could you be more lucky than starting in this business in sixty-seven and seeing how it's evolved to twenty-six? Now, getting to your question, the way I think about it is in the early days, very early days, people coded in machine language, ones and zeros.
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