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I'm afraid my situation isn't so different.

You could consider switching to contracting. If you are good, you can squeeze the same income into a shorter work week. Haven't done it myself, though.

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I am a contractor, am incorporated and have a fortune 100 company as my client. I work 8 hours a day for them maintaining their intranet and extra net applications. It is fairly obvious to me that I have hit a roadblock as there is no way for me to climb the ladder without having my own business at this point. I have been striving day and night to achieve that very goal, getting 4 hours of sleep at nights but I want an honest opinion from HN, do you really think people like me can achieve success? If I was still in college I could have locked myself up in a basement for weeks and created the next AI browser but I do not have that luxury. So I try to squeeze out three to four hours every day to work on my projects and launch them. This is not good enough as the market this day is moving really fast with dozens of hot startups springing up daily.

What about taking on an employee to handle (some of?) the contract stuff? Your revenue stays the same but costs go up by one employee. You then have some time to work on your other projects.

My client pays for me and are not willing to have me replaced by anyone else. I have tried numerous times. I have seen a lot of people do contractual replacements where they hire people has employees and place them as contractors in other companies. That seems like a fairly stable revenue model but the goal here is to provide software as a service rather than the placement of resources. I guess one option could be to work for a startup and try to get some stake in the company fairly early.

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