Evidence from 2023–mid‑2024 shows that software and broader tech companies did face sustained macro headwinds: venture funding into business software fell sharply (for example, European SaaS investment dropped about 59% in 2023 versus the prior year) as rising rates and the Silicon Valley Bank crisis created a “difficult financing climate” and lengthened sales cycles and tightened customer budgets for cloud/SaaS firms.(forbes.com) Large public software companies saw revenue growth and “growth efficiency” fall markedly between 2021 and 2023 even as sales and marketing spend kept rising, indicating it was harder to generate high growth without heavy spending.(mckinsey.com) Industry‑wide, overall IT‑spending forecasts for 2023 were cut roughly in half to low‑single‑digit growth amid economic uncertainty and CIO “change fatigue,” while 2024 was expected to improve but still described as constrained.(gartner.com) At the same time, tech companies executed unusually large layoffs—about 263,000 tech workers were laid off in 2023, with more than 120,000 additional cuts in 2024—as firms adjusted to higher interest rates and slower demand.(marketwatch.com) Analysts in 2024 still characterized the near‑term software outlook as positive but tempered by “heightened macroeconomic uncertainty” through 2024.(morningstar.com) Altogether, this supports Sacks’s qualitative claim that the roughly 4–6 quarters after December 2022 (early 2023 through mid‑2024) would be a period of major economic headwinds that made sustaining very high software growth without aggressive spending significantly harder, so the prediction is best judged as right.