In November 2025 a London venture capital firm called Balderton Capital published a sixty-five-slide report titled Gen Z Guide: Redefining Demand for the Next Decade. Its author is Laura McGinnis. Its readers, it tells us plainly on page six, are investors, founders and operators. Its subject is everybody born between 1997 and 2012.
That is a lot of everybody. Gen Z, the report says, is a quarter of the world's population. Citing the World Data Lab, it calls them the largest generation that will ever exist, likely the only one to reach two billion people. Only about ten per cent of them live in the United States or Europe. Half are multilingual.
They were born, the report says, into crisis. Terror alerts and school lockdowns. A recession that took jobs out of their own homes. A climate coming apart in public. Their parents did not try to shield them, the way the parents of Millennials did. They taught them to protect themselves instead. And so this generation grew up, in the report's gentle corporate phrasing, independent, sceptical and resilient.
Which is a polite way of saying they learned early that nobody was coming.
That is the portrait. But a venture capital report does not commission a portrait for its own sake. The investors came for the money, and the report gives it to them.
Gen Z spent an estimated $2.7 trillion in 2024, it says, drawing on Bank of America and Euromonitor. By 2035 they are expected to add another $8.9 trillion to the global economy, more than any generation before them. Their spending is growing twice as fast as their elders' did at the same age. Their entertainment spending grew 26 per cent in a year; their travel spending, 14 per cent.
Then, a few lines down, almost as an aside: most of them have savings that would not cover a single month of expenses.
Read those two facts together. A river of money flowing out, and almost nothing kept back. The report puts Gen Z's spending-to-savings ratio at 1.93, against 0.2 for Boomers. A third are willing to buy on credit. Their splurges go mostly to clothes and beauty, and the report says, with admirable honesty, that this spending is driven by peers and trends rather than financial comfort. Forty-three per cent feel financially insecure. A third believe they are behind where their parents were at the same age.
This is not a generation that is rich. It is a generation that has been taught to look rich, which is a different thing, and a far more profitable one for somebody.
They are not fools, though. Seventy per cent keep a budget. Forty-two per cent started investing before they turned twenty-five, twice the rate of Millennials. Sixty-two per cent want to start their own business. They are doing their arithmetic. It is just that the sums they have been handed do not add up.
Nor do they have much reason to trust the people who handed them those sums. This generation has looked at the institutions meant to look after it and drawn its own conclusions. Trust in governments, big companies and broadcast news is low. It has moved sideways instead, to friends, to small businesses, to creators. In a UK study the report cites, 58 per cent of people aged 13 to 27 said they trust their friends' social posts, against 37 per cent of those aged 28 to 65. Forty per cent of Gen Z, the report says, use TikTok every day as their main source of news.
Where trust goes, the platforms are already waiting. YouTube reaches 89 per cent of American Gen Z, Instagram 73, TikTok 71. Seventy-seven per cent discover products on TikTok. Social media is no longer entertainment. It is the shop window, the help desk, the newspaper and the town square at once, and the report's advice to brands follows accordingly: social is the new search, the new support desk, the new storefront, the new CRM.
The town square, in other words, has a cash register in the middle of it.
And the trust keeps moving. Three in four Gen Z students use AI regularly, the report says, and 69 per cent trust it. Ninety-one per cent use it to shop. One in four trusts AI over people when deciding what to buy next. They do not want to search, the report explains; they want to delegate. It quotes Sam Altman observing that young people barely make life decisions without first asking ChatGPT.
So a generation that no longer trusts the government, the newspaper or the bank has begun to trust the machine. The machine, of course, belongs to someone.
It would be easy to read all this as confusion, and the report, to its credit, does not. Its kindest and truest idea is that Gen Z's contradictions are not hypocrisy but a reasonable response to an unreasonable world. Its pairs are telling. This is a generation online for eight hours a day, and 73 per cent of them lonely. Eighty-five per cent call privacy a right; 88 per cent share their location. Half run a side hustle; three quarters are burnt out. They care about the climate, and they still buy from Shein. Forty-two per cent invest before twenty-five, and 52 per cent are extremely worried about money.
Each pair makes sense once you remember the starting conditions. You share your location because everyone you know does. You run the side hustle because the main job does not cover the rent. You buy the cheap dress because the ethical one costs a week's groceries.
Cost of living is their biggest fear, by a long way. And 55 per cent of young Britons believe society rewards being born rich more than it rewards merit.
They are not wrong about that. They have read the world correctly. The open question is what the people holding this report intend to sell them, now that they have.
Coming next, in Part 2: the five frontiers where investors plan to meet them.