Gen ZX: who this book is for, and what it is for

The first line of the 2018 book was this: "Hi Generation Z Developer, if you are one and want to learn as much as you can about your craft, this is the book for you." One generation, one reader, one line.

This edition needs a longer first line, because it is for two generations, and because it has an objective the first one did not have. So before anything else, let me say who I am talking to, and what I want to have happened by the time you close the book.

Two generations

In 2018 I wrote that Generation Z was "the generation born after 1996", "the first real 'born online' generation", and "the generation that is entering the job market right now". I focused on them because I had two daughters in it, because I had spent time teaching UK school kids to hack in the ethical sense, and because I worried they had missed the history behind the technology they took for granted. Eight years later they are entering the workforce for real, and a lot of them are not looking for a job. They are hungry, they are focused on this, and they are the new entrepreneurs. They are still the first reader.

The second reader is my own generation. The more I thought about who I want to give this book to, and what I want them to do with it, the more I arrived at the people I actually work with. The founders I see starting companies now are, a lot of them, Generation X. They are the subject-matter experts: twenty years inside a problem, in a pharmacy, a clinic, a legal practice or a security team, who have described the tool they need to vendor after vendor and never got it.

In The expert founders I put the change in three words: "Execution just got cheap." When agents do most of the building, the person who knows the problem can build the first version of the answer themselves, instead of explaining it to a team they could never afford. And the data was always on the experts' side, which is worth hearing before somebody tells you it is too late. In the largest study I know, of 2.7 million US founders, the mean age at founding of the fastest-growing one in a thousand new companies was 45, and founders with three or more years in the same industry reached that top tier at twice the rate of those with none. What held the experts back was not knowledge. It was access: to capital, to engineers, to the long and expensive build before anything could be shown. That is the part that just got cheap. A third of new US startups now have a single founder.

Often the two readers are in the same family. Generation Z are, by the dates, the children of Generation X, which is an interesting gap: one grew up with the agents, the other grew up with the problem. In the storyboard that goes with this chapter, the mother asks whether she can just build it now, after twenty years of explaining it, and the daughter says yes, and shows her the agent. That is the book, in two lines.

The dates I use are the Pew Research Center's: Generation X born 1965 to 1980, millennials 1981 to 1996, Generation Z 1997 to 2012. Boundaries differ between sources, and like all generation boundaries they generalise; the 2018 book said so too, and I still mean it. That leaves the millennials in the middle. They can read this, and they will get a lot from it, but theirs is a different story, and I would rather write the two I know from the inside: I am Generation X, and my daughters are Generation Z.

Generation ZX

Put the two letters together and you get Generation ZX, which is a plot twist I did not plan and now cannot give up, because it goes back to my origins. The ZX Spectrum was launched by Sinclair Research in the UK in April 1982, when Generation X was between two and seventeen. If you are my age, you may have typed a program from a magazine into one, line by line, and watched it run, or not run, and gone looking for the typo. That machine is where a lot of us learnt that a computer was something you could own, open and program. The storyboard has the whole language of it on a board: two lines of BASIC, and the second one is GOTO 10.

One more thing about the name, and then I will leave it alone. It is Gen ZX, not Gen XZ. XZ is also the name of a compression library that had a backdoor planted in it in 2024, the most famous supply-chain attack of recent years, and in a book that covers security the order of the letters matters.

And they are developers. The title keeps the word on purpose. The entrepreneurs I am talking about are coding: with agents, in the way the newsroom calls explorer coding, which is a better name for what most people call vibe coding. Explorer coding says it in one line: "What people call vibe coding is exploration, and the word should say so." The explorer builds to find out, and what the exploration produces is the brief for the version other people will rely on. A founder needs both halves, the exploring and the handover, and Explorer coding, not vibe coding, and the handover is the chapter on them. Before it, Everyone who can brief an agent is a developer says why the word now includes you, even if you have never written a line of code and do not intend to read the ones the agent writes.

What it is for

The 2018 book had a chapter called Be a founder. What it meant was attitude: "act like one of the founders of the business" you work for. Imagine you were employee number four and cared deeply about the company. Ask what you would do differently, what needs to be done now that would make a big difference, what values you would fight for. Then ask the question the chapter ended on: "what is stopping you from doing just that?" It is still good advice, and the part of this book about getting a job keeps it as the then of a then-and-now. But in 2026 the advice is literal. You can be the founder.

So this book has an objective, which the first edition did not. I said it to the team making the book in one sentence: "Our job is to empower the reader to create a startup by the end of the book." This is the book you give somebody who wants to start a GenAI company. If that is you, here is what it has to contain, for real: the company itself, how to create a limited company in the UK, the case for Lithuania, Portugal, because that is where I am from, and the European Union and what exists there for a founder; the cloud providers and the startup programmes that exist right now; and the first sale.

Two honest clauses about that list. The chapters on the company are written from experience, mine and the people I work with, and they are not legal or tax advice. And the programmes and the credits change every year, so they live in the hands-on part at the end of the book, dated, to be renewed each year while the argument in the rest of the book stays put.

The shape of the middle follows from the objective. Start the company is the centre of the book: be a founder, ship it and see if they miss it, price it and then give it away, sell, fund it or do not, and the company itself. The whole thing is about shipping now. As the newsroom's The question is whether they miss it puts it: "Not to plan, not to pitch, not to architect. Ship." You ship it, and it is painful. If you give it away and they do not miss it, you try again.

Then Build it without a server: ship your startup serverless. No servers of yours with logic in them, no database of yours, the work done on the user's side. A founder with no servers has nothing to run at three in the morning and nothing to pay for when nobody is using it. SG/Send and sgit come in there, because they give you data privacy without a server that can read the data, and RiskMandate's techniques come in as the way to control the agents your company runs on. Each has its chapter, and the hands-on part ends with a product shipped that way in a weekend.

The measure

A book that is a book to read is fine. A book with an objective is a different thing: it can fail, and it can be measured. So I will say plainly how I measure this one: by how many companies have been created from it.

That means asking you to tell us what you are doing, and building a community around the people who do. The last chapter, How this book was made, and what you made, says how. If you started a company because of something you read here, that is the first entry in the measure, and I would like to hear about it before I hear about anything else.

That is who you are, as far as this book is concerned, and what I want you to have done by the last page. The next chapter says why, whichever of the two generations you belong to, you are lucky to be starting now.