When starting up a new company, do you find a new profitable idea and decide to start or do you have a desire to own your company and you don't want to work as an employee?  Which one is important and sustainable?

In my opinion you should start when you have the strong desire to start a company and not when you have a light bulb moment or an idea that seems to be profitable from afar. The reason I say this is because starting a company can be a real tough ride, there will be many ups and downs, and you would need lot of determination to get through this. This will only come when you have a strong desire to achieve something. Moreover an idea is nothing without execution, read . You may not be looking to raise VC funding but this answer beautifully describes why an idea alone can’t help you create a successful company.

I would say when you have a new idea that solves a big enough problem with a big enough payoff to relentlessly drive you to execute it well. Evaluate the opportunity like a VC. Is this useful enough to generate a significant amount of profit? The desire not to work for someone else is very secondary, for me at least. The second option is OK when you want to start a lifestyle business. :) None of this is easy. Everything takes a lot longer than it should.

You need to have a desire to have control over your life - not being an employee. You must have trust in your knowledge and experience as well so you can grow a company as well. You will succeed.

How would you know it is profitable if you haven't started yet? What you need is faith and then you need to deliver.

It doesn't matter which ones important.. If you wanna do it, get off ur ass and just do it! Make mistakes, Go nuts, it's all part of the learning experience and somewhere in this topsy-turvy ride u l find ur answer

Maybe i don't have quite enough knowledge to give you an wise answer. But i have some good experiences that i want to share with you. 3 years ago, i started my own company. With things you mentioned in mind : my passion, a profitable idea, and a credible partner (my closest friend). I can't tell you in details, but here are some of the problems, that happened for all the new businesses, that didn't turn out as i thought it would be : I wasn't good enough in my field (recording & making music), compare to all the others on the market. I just thought that i was. Naive is the word. The competition for the market share is too harsh and painful. When people realize that they can make easy money out of that market, they all jump in to have a share. You have to fight the huge & rich competitors for the big clients, and many many small ones for the rest. Price drops down real quick, and so is the profit. Only the bests and rich ones survived. I started fighting with my partners since our ideas are usually varies. It started small, and acceptable. But soon enough we cannot find our agreement on anything. Yet, we splited from each other. You have to maintain advertising, marketing from time to time, to keep telling the clients that you're still on the market. And the price for marketing is a painful amount, too. Some of the clients are dicks. But you have to treat them like gods and obey their idea. It's much harder than i think. Blah blah blah . I had to closed my first business after a year. I didn't make many profits. But i gained a lot of precious experiences and know what i have to accomplish in order to make my next project happens and achieves success. And i'm telling you this, it's the PASSION that keeps me going everyday and i won't kneel before the failures. It will never fade.