I’ll admit in my early 30s I did 7a-12a 5 (sometimes 6) days a week. But I was the founding CTO and had a good amount of skin in the game. My hours broke down as: 7a-4p support, calls, meetings, being available to the team. 4p-12a working on my coding tasks.
It also involved walking around 6p-7p and “kicking out” others. Very rare was anyone else there on the weekends with me.
It sounds like you made a choice, and like the examples he cites in the article, you had significant upside. And, kicking everyone else out meant that you were aware of the tradeoffs, at least conceptually. Think a lot of us have chose tradeoffs like that in our lives. The thing that's tacky here is that the CEO assumes his employees need to behave like a founder.
It also involved walking around 6p-7p and “kicking out” others. Very rare was anyone else there on the weekends with me.
Do I regret it? No.
Would I do it again? Hell no.