What else is there to being successful other than productivity?

I'd suggest this: DHH mentions "an amazing ability to get stuff done when the objectives are reasonably clear", but in a startup, often there is no "objective" - reasonably clear or not. Instead, there is something more like a search heuristic based on "the view form here". With time, the heuristic changes, and the objective changes, and the strategy changes, and the product changes. If I remember correctly, Flickr started as a Flash-based chat website. To get from there to what Flickr was acquired as required the notorious "startup hours". Basecamp went through no such life-changing make-overs, and so didn't require those kinds of hours.