Available data show that 2023 was clearly a tougher demand year for software and SaaS, but there is no sector‑wide measurement of “new customer business / new bookings vs. 2022” that would allow a clean yes/no on Sacks’s specific 50% figure.

What we can see:

• Sacks’s quote on the episode is indeed: “You should expect your new business to be roughly 50% of what it was. Next year it’ll be 50% of what it was last year. That’s my rule of thumb for most companies. New business down 50%.” (allinpodcast.readablepods.com)
• Gartner’s post‑hoc market‑share analysis shows worldwide enterprise software revenue grew 11.0–11.1% in 2023 to about $785–788 billion, rather than shrinking, despite macro headwinds. (gartner.com) Earlier forecasts for 2023 had also called for high single‑ to low double‑digit growth in enterprise software spend, and those broad numbers were borne out. (saastr.com) This tells us overall software revenue and spend continued to rise; it does not directly tell us how much of 2023’s new bookings were down vs. 2022.
• Bessemer’s Cloud 100 Benchmarks Report notes that for the 2023 Cloud 100 (100 top private cloud/SaaS companies), the average revenue growth rate dropped from ~100% in 2022 to ~55% in 2023 – i.e., growth was “nearly halved” in that cohort. (bvp.com) That is directionally consistent with Sacks’s idea that the pace of new business would fall sharply, but it’s a revenue‑growth statistic for a specific elite subset, not a bookings‑level statistic for “most software companies.”
• Other industry summaries of the SaaS market also report that the market size increased from roughly $237B in 2022 to about $273B in 2023 (~15% growth), even while describing 2023 as a “year of efficiency” with slower growth and more cautious buyers. (fox.agency) Again, these figures speak to overall revenue/market size, not to new‑logo or new‑ARR bookings as a percentage of 2022.

The key problems in judging the prediction are:

1. No unified bookings metric: New‑customer bookings are not reported consistently across vendors, and there is no global dataset aggregating “2023 new customer business vs. 2022” for “most software companies.” Public sources focus on revenue, ARR, and sometimes total billings, not the specific “new customer bookings” slice.
2. Level vs. growth: Where we do have broad data (e.g., Cloud 100), the main story is that growth rates roughly halved, not that new‑business levels themselves dropped to 50% of the prior year. That’s qualitatively similar but not the same as “new bookings are 50% of 2022 in absolute dollars.”
3. Heterogeneity: The evidence we have is heavily skewed toward large public vendors and top‑tier private cloud companies. Sacks’s comment was about “most companies,” including a long tail of smaller and mid‑market software firms for which we lack systematic bookings data; operator anecdotes vary widely.

Putting this together: the direction of Sacks’s call – that 2023 would see a pronounced slowdown in new business for many software/SaaS vendors – is supported by multiple sources. But his specific quantitative claim that, in calendar 2023, new customer bookings for most software companies would fall to “roughly 50%” of 2022 can’t be rigorously confirmed or falsified from public data. Because of the absence of a comprehensive, comparable bookings metric, the prediction’s accuracy has to be rated as ambiguous rather than clearly right or clearly wrong.