There's doubtless a relationship between work input and output, but what I thought you were referring to was this:
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four."
I do think that's a simplistic, but accurate, description of many successful startups.
It worked for my grandfather as a farmer and my father as an artist. There's no reason it shouldn't work for me with technology.