Today's frame
A CAC payback period of 33 months in public SaaS reveals an industry caught between growth theater and genuine unit economics—far beyond the 12-18 month threshold that once separated disciplined operators from burn merchants.
The tension appears across today's selections: infrastructure pricing models migrating from GPU hours to token economics suggest margin pressure will persist, while emerging frameworks for revenue durability force a reckoning with which SaaS multiples were ever justified and which were simply ZIRP artifacts. The dean of valuation entering the conversation signals that strategic finance is no longer the domain of operators alone; the academy smells blood. Watch whether CAC payback compression becomes the new North Star metric or whether growth-at-all-costs finds yet another rebrand.
