Building on the premises of attention-based view, cognitive-experiential self-theory, and cognitive motivation, we examine how entrepreneur’s cognitive process of information gathering and processing affect attention allocation across attributes contributing to start-up location choice. We derive four theoretically defined groups of factors influencing entrepreneurial location choice: functional economic, experiential economic, personal social ties, and personal quality of life attributes. We run the best-worst scaling conjoin experiment on 121 founders of start-up ventures located in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland. Our findings suggest that founders with higher rational decision-making style pay significantly more attention to economic rather than to personal location attributes. Experiential decision-making style does not significantly affect attention distribution. The founders with higher need for cognitive closure pay more attention to experiential economic location attributes, which helps to minimize the need for additional information search and ambiguity. The use of effectual decision-making heuristic did not moderate the relationship between rational decision-making style and importance of economic vs personal location attributes. The paper clarifies the relationship between the lower (motivational) levels of entrepreneur’s cognitive processing and attention allocation in decision-making and provides empirical evidence of the remarkable role of individual information processing differences in start-up location choice.