Ask HN: If you had unlimited talent and money, what startup would you do?

Unlimited? Total world domination, with better marketing. (I think I'd be virtually ethically required to do it, on a line of reasoning similar to "I have infinite resources. The government of, without loss of generality, India does not. Giving them a tiny fraction of my resources didn't work out because they are observably incompetent, and this incompetence is killing Indians. Shucks. Oh well, since I have infinite resources, getting root on India is trivial for me. repeat this analysis for almost all human institutions")

This is the first half of a zen koan, the second half is "why aren't you doing that?" part of a self discovery process to find where your passion lies.

I don't think this would be the best thing to use unlimited talent and money, but I'd really like to work on a perfect code editor/IDE.

I find all editors I used somehow broken. I've used Emacs, Vim and Eclipse so far, and all of them seem at the same time appealing and defficient, each has something cool other two lack, and something that really sucks. (For example I love that I can has Haskell repl open as buffer in Emacs, but I hate Emacs keybindings). There are also a few editors I haven't tried yet (which I should do), and I'm aware that all of those I tried are customizable by plugins. Perhaps a huge pack of vim plugins would be solution here; but maybe we need some new concepts about editing, browsing and running code? I believe there are lots of things to try out there, and I hope that LightTable will deliver some new great tools, the kind of 'obvious in hindsight' ideas, that you can't live without once you tried them.

Like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, with unlimited money, I would junk punch every single person who ever used the phrase "going forward" … in alphabetical order.

The one I'm working on right now -- it's the startup I want to do the most at the moment. After, space junk cleanup, improve plastic recycling, software/games for medical compliance, and a cable channel/network with nothing but 80s tv shows and movies.

Google Fiber to every home in the world and high bandwidth / low latency wireless across the world.

...given the assumption that were talking tech startup stuff.

AI - a computer you can converse with.

World-scale MMORPG based on real geography.

Virtual worlds - transfer your consciousness to a digital substrate.

World peace. End starvation. Real problems.

It depends. Add "0% chance of failure", and I might have some ideas.

The wording bothers me because I'm nitpicky.

If your talent was truly unlimited, you could do every startup.

If your money was unlimited, then you would probably get assassinated.