Sen. Bernie Sanders seems completely serious about the proposal he offered this week to wipe out all the debt of student loan borrowers, and if nothing else this seems to confirm that the collective weight of student debt is a problem that has the nation's attention.
The partners of Minneapolis-based Loup Ventures have been thinking about the student loan problem, too, having just written about it in the first of a planned series of research notes that will outline 99 big problems for entrepreneurs and innovators to go after.
No one should get too much credit for recognizing that student loans might be a burden, as total loans amount to about $1.5 trillion spread among roughly 45 million borrowers. Total student debt shot past total credit card debt nearly 10 years ago and is now inching up on double that of credit cards.
About 11% of student loans were more than 90 days delinquent or in default as of the first quarter, according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. One think-tank analysis from last year suggested that up to 40 percent of borrowers could end up defaulting on their loans.
But the thing to remember is that if there's this much pain, there's also got to be a lot of opportunity for businesses to find solutions that ease some of that pain.
That's the basic point of Loup Ventures' recent research note, that it takes a big problem to solve to get a great idea for a startup and, of course, a great venture capital investment.
That might seem like it should be obvious. But from experience I know you are likely to hear from entrepreneurs all about cool products or even features more than the pain of potential users. Even for those founders who are thinking clearly, figuring out whether something really solves the right problem isn't easy.
One of the things that's refreshing about the approach Loup Ventures' partners outline is that as former analysts at an investment bank, they didn't go into the venture business with the same understanding of problems that they have now.