You're missing a key point: it is possible for a founder to be obsessively focused on a business without engaging in behavior that causes employees severe agita.

Without starting a debate about the benefits or perils of work-life balance, most startup employees should recognize the following facts:

1. Startup founders are not created equal. In today's hot market, there are a lot of inexperienced and incompetent people running startups. These people can work as hard as they want and ooze passion from every pore in their bodies but at the end of the day, they're incapable of building successful businesses.

2. Statistically, most startups won't achieve an exit. At those that do, most employees don't "make lots of money."

3. Many startups offer far fewer learning experiences than employees would like to believe because misdirected hustle and hard work are encouraged and rewarded even though they are not correlated with competence and outcomes.