The State of Gen Z: Power, Paradox, and the Next Decade of Change

A new report exploring the habits, contradictions, and ambitions shaping the world’s most connected generation.

Gen Z, born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, isn’t just another generation, they’re a social and cultural reset. The boundaries between consumption, creativity, and citizenship have collapsed, redefining what participation means across every part of life. Born into uncertainty and raised online, they’ve learned to adapt faster than the systems built to serve them. What looks like contradiction is really adaptation, a generation that turns crisis into creativity and technology into everyday infrastructure. They’re redefining how identity, trust, and value take shape in the world around them.

Set to reach over two billion people globally and twelve trillion dollars in projected spending power by 2035, Gen Z isn’t just influencing markets, they’re defining them. Their financial power, digital fluency, and cultural reach are converging faster than any generation before.

I spent the past year immersed in this work, consulting with Gen Zs themselves, the Edelman Gen Z Lab, BCG, and a global network of VCs and founders to understand how this generation thinks, builds, and buys. This report is for investors, founders, and operators who want to stay ahead of that shift.

The architecture of a new global identity

Most reports treat Gen Z as naive or contradictory, a generation that can’t make up its mind. After months of research, I found the opposite. The challenge isn’t inconsistency, it’s complexity. Gen Z lives at the intersection of micro-communities so global and niche that old generational frameworks no longer apply. A gamer in Seoul may share more values with a climate activist in Paris than with someone who grew up down the street. Each behaviour, how they work, study, spend, or use AI, reflects a distinct community, not a collective stereotype. This report unpacks those worlds across five verticals, treating them not as contradictions but as the architecture of a new global generation.

I was drawn to this generation because of their ability to hold chaos lightly. They describe themselves as “unserious” or “not okay,” yet meet the world’s heaviness with humor, honesty, and a refusal to look away. I have never been so transfixed by the internet’s response to current events or so eager to rush into the comments section as I am with this generation. My hope comes from their activism, their ambition to work hard but only on what matters, and their ability to stay self-aware even in the noise. They’re health-conscious, globally curious, and hungry to see the world in ways my generation wasn’t always encouraged to.

A new generation of founders is emerging

More Gen Zs are pitching to us too, founders in their teens and twenties, building products that skip steps, rethink systems, and do it with humility and humor. I met a 19-year-old recently who wants to reinvent identity access management. At 19, I didn’t even know what that was. That’s what makes this generation so magnetic: they’re idealists who execute.
This deep dive is my attempt to make sense of that energy, to understand what drives Gen Z’s optimism, ambition, and creativity, and what that means for how we build for them. It’s equal parts research and reflection, shaped by founders, experts, and young people defining what comes next.

We’re witnessing a powerful shift toward this consumer and the technologies built around them, and this piece is as much a commentary on where technology is headed as it is on the generation leading it. If you’re building for this audience, we’d love to hear from you. At Balderton, we’ve spent time understanding this shift and backing the European founders shaping its future.