Why do you want to be an entrepreneur? It's an insane job with super high risk and crazy hours and totally unknown outcome at the end of the day. What do you want at the end of the day anyway? What do you want to achieve and what do you want to experience along the way? It's critical to think through these issues before you get too far down your journey.

Let's start with the end point. Are you interested in being the CEO of a unicorn or a Fortune 500 public company? Are you looking to have an extremely public, super high responsibility job? Or, are you more interested in running a lifestyle business? Something small and profitable?

Do you want to have lots of direct reports or do you want to be a solopreneur?  Maybe, in ten years, you want to be a serial entrepreneur, working on the startup after the startup, after the startup, after this one.

What kind of experience do you want to have along the way? Do you want to be  grinding away at a super high risk, high speed startup where you're trying to grow at 30% month over month? Or are you more interested in doing something a little more casual?

Are you comfortable eating Ramen every day for the next five years while you try to build this startup, or do you need something that's going to throw off cash from the very beginning?

Do you want to run a virtual company, or would you like to have a physical office?

Do you enjoy 100 hours work weeks or do you want to do four hour work weeks so you have time to do fishing, surfing, hiking, or whatever other activities you're into?

The key is: don't create someone else's idea of what a startup should be. There's a lot of social expectations around what a founder should do or be and what a successful startup looks like. But you don't need to live their life. You don't need to be part of that story.

You can choose what kind of startup experience and outcome you want to build towards and do so with intentionality. Take the time now to think through what you want so that you end up where you want to be, not where society tells you that you should be.

What are your thoughts on the right kind of startup for you and how founders should think about that decision? Let us know in the comments!