Abstract
Despite the observation that initial motives for launching a business vary greatly among entrepreneurs, the implications of this variation has received virtually no scholarly attention. In this paper we examine how differences in entrepreneurial motives, and the extent to which they are congruous with qualitatively different life-goals, affect people pursuing the establishment of new ventures. This is an important complement to prior entrepreneurial motivation studies, which have studied a limited set of motives and a small range of outcomes. Our research allows for the full range of people’s life-goals and motives for pursuing entrepreneurship to be studied.