In Part 1, Balderton's report told us who Gen Z are. In its second half, it tells investors what to do about them, and this is where the language changes. People become cohorts. Loneliness becomes a market. Fear becomes a frontier.
The turn begins with five shifts the report expects to shape the coming decade. The first is a war for young talent, as ageing populations in the West meet youthful ones in the Global South and countries compete for young workers the way airlines compete for passengers. The second is a rise in NEETs: one in five young people worldwide are not in education, employment or training. They are, quite simply, disconnected. The third is a gender divide at breaking point, with Gen Z reporting more tension between men and women than any previous generation, and women facing high rates of harassment online. The fourth is AI redrawing the workforce. Ninety-three per cent of Gen Z use it weekly; sixty-two per cent believe it could take their job. They use it anyway, because the alternative is falling behind. The fifth is trust fracturing into micro-networks, where peers rather than institutions decide what is true.
Read that list again, slowly. It describes a generation being pushed out of work, out of education, away from each other and out of the old structures of belief. And it is offered, without irony, as a map of opportunity.
The report says so almost in those words. Gen Z, it observes, has not yet chosen its bank, its therapist, its classroom or its marketplace. Everything is still up for grabs. So it names five investable frontiers, and for each one it draws a market map, a neat grid of startup logos with little stars beside the ones it feels especially bullish about.
The first frontier is digital privacy and trust. Gen Z is scammed more often than Boomers, and imposter scams reported to the US Federal Trade Commission rose 57 per cent between 2020 and 2024. The young call privacy a right and then trade their data for convenience, because convenience is what is on offer and the right is not. The report's phrase is that privacy has become product, not policy. Which is to say that what should have been protected by law will now be sold back by subscription.
The second is learning. College has lost its shine; half of American graduates work in jobs that do not use their degrees, and the median age in skilled trades is falling as the young pick up toolbelts. They learn from YouTube, from chatbots, from creators. Forty-five per cent are learning a new language. The classroom, the report concludes, has become optional.
If the classroom is optional, so, increasingly, is the act of choosing. The third frontier, agentic commerce, is the one the report seems most excited by: AI agents that search, compare, choose and buy on your behalf. Gen Z uses AI for product research eleven times more than Boomers, and the report calls them the Do It For Me generation. Shopping, it says, should become ambient. It should run in the background, like a heartbeat, like a drip.
The fourth frontier is wellness, and here the report's own figures do most of the talking. The most connected generation in history is also the loneliest. Seventy-three per cent feel lonely sometimes or always, more than people over sixty-five. Sixty per cent feel overwhelmed by the news. And yet they spend: Gen Z and Millennials make up 36 per cent of adults but drive more than 41 per cent of a $2 trillion wellness market. The report calls real-life intimacy and mental health the new luxury goods.
Intimacy, a luxury good. It is worth sitting with that phrase for a moment, because the report means it as a compliment.
The fifth frontier is work and wealth. Gen Z's idea of financial success, according to one survey the report cites, is $587,000 a year in income and $9.4 million in net worth. Seventy-one per cent believe they will get there. The report has a name for the gap between that dream and the arithmetic of Part 1, where most of them could not cover a month's expenses. It calls it delulu economics. Then it lists the credit builders, buy-now-pay-later firms and gamified investing apps waiting to meet them on the way.
The report closes with advice for the builders. Build for global scale but win through cultural depth, because a gamer in Rio may have more in common with a gamer in Paris than with the boy next door. Cater to Gen Z's ambition and its anxiety alike. Earn credibility through peers, not institutions. Help the young earn and build on their own, since a fifth are already disconnected from traditional work. And turn the collapse of trust into an advantage by building credibility into the product itself rather than the marketing.
To be fair, and fairness matters here, much of this is good advice. Products that give young people real control over their data, real skills, real connection and real financial footing would be worth building. Balderton is a venture firm and does not pretend otherwise; it names its own portfolio companies, from Revolut to Depop to Cleo, without embarrassment. A report written for investors is allowed to talk about markets. And plenty of the founders on those market maps are young people themselves, trying to fix the things that hurt them.
Still, something stays with you after the last slide, and it is not any single recommendation. It is the shape of the thing. A generation is born into recession and lockdown and burning summers. It is lonely, anxious, underpaid, overcharged, and told by every screen it holds that it should be rich by now. And the response of the people with money is not, mostly, to ask why. It is to ask what it will buy.
Nor does the report ever quite pause on the obvious tension in its own advice. It tells founders to earn the trust of a generation that has learned, correctly, to distrust anyone who profits from it.
The young, the report says, trust each other and not institutions. They trust the machine more than the salesman. They have read the world correctly. Perhaps the most useful thing they could do with this report is read it too, all sixty-five slides, and see exactly how carefully they are being watched.