Executive Summary The purpose of this study was to examine entrepreneur motivation in GuangZhou, China. This study collected a sample of 337 respondents from three different groups: (1) Group 1, people who do not want to start a business; (2) Group 2, people who want to start a business but have not yet tried; and (3) Group 3, people who have already started a business and succeeded, i.e., entrepreneurs. This study hypothesized that entrepreneur characteristics and the external business environment have great contributions to motivation to start a business. It was expected that entrepreneur characteristics, including Achievement-Striving, Optimism, and Attitude Toward Social Networking are positively related to Motivation to Start a Business. And the external environment, measured by Evaluation of the Business Environment, is positively related to motivation to start a business. Group 3 was expected to be higher in entrepreneur characteristics and evaluations of the business environment than Group 2, and Group 2 was expected to be higher than Group 1. In this study, correlations, ANOVAs, and multiple regression analysis were used to test the hypotheses. The results showed that all entrepreneur characteristics (Achievement-Striving, Optimism, and Attitude Toward Social Networking) and the external environment (Evaluation of the Business Environment) were significantly and positively correlated with motivation to start a business. Of the demographic variables, Educational Level was significantly and negatively related to motivation to start a business. Moreover, males had higher motivation to start a business than did females. In addition, Achievement-Striving was found to be the most significant predictor for motivation to start a business. Implications for motivating more people to start businesses, limitations of the study, and future research are also discussed.