I suspect he thinks he should have figured out a way to do both and not make it into an explicit trade-off. In fact, I think the entire post is about how "having+eating the cake" is possible if you put some effort into it.
That's circular, though. How could he put yet more effort into something besides his business success when he said that he was pouring everything he had into it?
I would have respected his viewpoint a lot more if he had just said, "I didn't need to make all that money. My family should have been more important and I should have chosen them over the next shipping date at least 6 out of 10 times. If it had meant missing delivery dates and loss of some contracts, then so be it."
Work smart, not just hard. The question is whether or not it would have been possible - and whether or not the compromises he made on his family life actually made the difference between failure and success.
In other words, those emails answered by sneaking off to the bathroom, did they matter in the success of the company, or could they have waited until morning?
Would leaving the office an hour early twice a week have resulted in missing delivery dates and loss of contracts? If they did, were those deliveries and contracts critical to the exit? Did dragging everyone into work on a weekend actually help the company, or was all that hard work (on his part and his employees') actually slowing down their engineering?
None of that is obvious. I dislike the Silicon Valley meme that family and money are mutually exclusive, or that one must necessarily go on suicidal work-rampages for months/years on end to achieve financial success. There is a world of difference between what looks critical and what is critical. I also dislike the notion that a bunch of sleep-deprived, high-strung people who don't have their shit together, staying alive by a combination of greed, caffeine, and blood pressure, is what "working optimally" looks like. It's clearly not.
This whole blog post is basically a post mortem where the author wonders if all those things that he thought had to be done right then, right there, actually had to be, or whether there was more wiggle room than he thought at the time.
> How could he put yet more effort into something besides his business success when he said that he was pouring everything he had into it?
By redirecting some efforts into optimizing the way he handles his business and family, thus making them require less effort for the same level of effect.
