This paper investigates whether start-up motivation (opportunity versus necessity) influences entrepreneurial performance of an important subset of entrepreneurs, viz. the solo self-employed. We also explore to what extent human capital measures mediate this relation. We use a unique individual-level panel data set of solo self-employed in the Netherlands for three consecutive years (2009-2011) and construct three separate measures to identify necessitydriven solo self-employment. Our main finding confirms that necessity-driven solo self-employed perform worse than opportunity-driven solo self-employed. Furthermore, start-up motivation seems to have an isolated effect on entrepreneurial performance, considering that we also find that formal education and practical learning hardly mediate the relation. Our results imply that it is important to distinguish between different motivations within the population of solo self-employed in order to understand their entrepreneurial performance.