Also, if the OP worked the hours he worked, chances are he didn't have any occasion to get a solid business experience. And a startup's success depends on many more factors then good engineering - for example sales.
That being said, it may not be possible for you. Just like many of the people here on HN, you may be cursed with the knowledge that only by working for yourself will you be happy.
If you wanted to earn £150k in the UK at age 29/30 (leaving university at 21/22 with 3 + 5 years of work as I suggested) one way would be to work in financial IT. A salary of £70-100k wouldn't be unreasonable if you were very good and a bonus of 50-100% would be possible, again if you're very good. I'm not in this situation myself so don't speak form direct experience but I know people in the industry who almost certainly are (it'd be rude to ask...).
If this all sounds far fetched, I work at a fund which is on track to make a profit per employee of around $500k this year (and as everyone knows, this is a bad year). Even given that bonuses are skewed towards the researchers that means they can still afford to reward the best IT people handsomely. And they're sensible enough with money to know that there are people in IT who they really couldn't afford to lose so they will pay accordingly.
Most of these are permalance arrangements, those numbers will get you up in >200k range.
Get into computers/UNIX/Linux when you're 13. Start working at startups when you're 15 as a junior sysadmin/scripter. Continue doing contract work through college. Become an expert UNIX developer by the time you are 21.
After college, work a few years for a company doing a high-end specialty product such as enterprise search or ERP system. Work on big client accounts. You want to beef up your resume at this point.
After 4 years start your own consulting firm in this space. Earn $150/hr+ for 30 or so hours/week doing consulting work and charge $5k/month/server for managed hardware running aforementioned enterprise platforms.
At this point you'll easily be making $250k, probably closer to $350k.
Or you could learn how to program in college and spend years 21-30 writing shitty web apps for startups, hoping to strike it rich when you're not a founder (stupid). This is what most people do.
Moral of the story: either do high end enterprise work, or be a startup founder. You will surely get screwed otherwise. This is a brutal industry and those who don't choose their paths wisely become wage slaves who make significantly less than blue collar tradesman.
Your complaints seem to be:
- you feel you're working too hard and too long
- you don't have a work/life balance, hence the girlfriend problem
- you want to lead the good life
- you are peeved that your hard work is making money for others
And who are you?
- by the sounds of it you're a good engineer
- in your twenties you can command a salary in the $100k range
- you're a workaholic, or you allow yourself to be sucked into being a workaholic
From all the talk on here about what startups are like, you'll end up working long hours, you won't improve your work/life situation and all for the questionable payoff at the end. Of all the YC funded startups, all the posting on here of 'feedback on my startup please', how many of those people are walking away after say two years with anything comparable to the $200k you'd make in those two years?
If I were you, I'd restrict my working to 9-10 hours a day Monday-Friday, don't work in the evenings and don't work at weekends. Sort your personal life out. If you're as good as you think you are, which I have no reason to believe you aren't, then in 5 years time you could be earning a salary + bonus of $250k+, all for working a sane schedule. What life style do you want to lead that that wouldn't be enough to live on? And don't worry about the fact that your CEO is earning more than you, someone's always going to be earning more than you, the only thing that matters is whether you have what you need to allow you to live the way you want to.