Depending on how you count, I'm on my 5th or 6th startup, starting from 1996. Of the previous 4-5 (ie, not including Starfighter), all but one had good exits; three of them grossed me a pretty substantial amount of money.
Only one of those companies demanded my evenings and weekends; it did so because I was a cofounder and I let it do that. And it's the one that failed catastrophically.
2 startups back for me is Arbor Networks, which I joined in 2001, and which was acquired in 2010 for a very large amount of money (it had hundreds of employees at the time). I was hired to take over as lead dev from Dug Song on their flagship product, which at the time (a) had no major customers and (b) was locked in an intense dogfight with two other well-funded competitors with the same small set of customer prospects.
I worked one weekend. Arbor got a deal to monitor the South Korean Winter Olympics for DDoS attacks and the engineering team took shifts managing the deployment. A big deal was made over the fact that we were being asked to do that.
(I later switched from dev to product management, and my schedule got grueling; in particular, I had the worst travel burden of my career. But I asked for that.)
No. I don't think I have normal weekends because I'm wealthy enough to thumb my nose at the startup lifestyle. I thumb my nose at that lifestyle because it is moronic and doesn't work.
Thanks! I knew you had more than Matasano under your belt, but not how many.
I'm still doubtful if startups can generally work with "sensible hours". It's probably one of the big reasons why I never thought about joining one (besides that it's still unusual in Germany).
If so, do you think your "normal weekend" is mostly related to one of the following points, all of them, or something else entirely?
a) wealthy enough, not needing to make it work to put food on the table
b) old enough to have priorities shifted
c) easier circumstances (like reputation, network of colleagues etc.)