Marketplace Morning Reports' new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning Report wherever you get your

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Pink slips in one of the most exclusive corners of Silicon Valley. From American public media,

this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Lillie Dremalli.

Silicon Valley was thrown off balance this year thanks to an ongoing rise in interest rates

and a particularly unpredictable stock market. Now, a rare sighting. Layoffs adventure

capital firms. They're giving us a fresh look at just how deep the disruption goes.

In the past few weeks, two of the biggest names in VCs, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator,

both parted ways with a number of their staff and investors. These kinds of layoffs were once

unthinkable, according to Sarah McBride, a reporter at Bloomberg News. She says the outlook for

startups and their investors has been bleak for a while, and the latest layoffs are part of a

bigger trend. It's just a reckoning right now. People had been so brash and optimistic,

and a lot of people who'd come into the ecosystem, say, 10 years ago, had known only success.

They saw so many companies just having these incredible and successful trajectories where

in three to five years, a lot of them were selling for hundreds of millions of dollars or

listing on stock markets. We had more unicorns than ever before. A unicorn is a company worth

a billion dollars or more. Every year, the number of unicorns was growing astronomically.

Now, what people are watching is how many companies which had once been valued at a billion

dollars are now cutting their valuations to way less than that. People just aren't walking

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