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.
