I've heard failure is good, but 10 years is a long time. That's how long I've been failing for now.You're considering "giving up" after 10 years? You have no fucking idea. No offense, but you're just spoiled by a culture of instant gratification. In most societies and in most of history, it took generational timespans to go from nothing to wealth. People moved to the towns at 15 as laborers (often worse off than peasants) so their kids could join the working class and their grandkids would have a shot at joining guilds so their great-great-grandkids would be wealthy merchants and their fourth-great-grandkids (whom they'd never live to see) just might join the gentry or the lowest edge of nobility.
It's not your fault. The crime of the pseudo-meritocracy that exists now is that (a) well over 90% of the people who have knock-out success by age 25 had parental lift, but (b) society does a damn good job of making sure that it looks like they earned it. It makes rapid ascension look not just possible, but normal. It's not: not even fucking close.
You feel like a failure because you're comparing yourself to people who have all sorts of ridiculous, but also invisible, advantages. You shouldn't beat yourself up that you can't compete with the kids who close $5 million seed rounds fresh out of Stanford. That's like trying to compete with a cheetah in the 100m dash: you just weren't born with it.
When I was 15 me and my friend started a little hosting website. It was really fun. I learnt to program, and we even made a little bit of money. In the excitement I began to learn about business, startups and programming. I thought it was going to be so easy to make money.
It sounds like you didn't fail. Not making money is failing. Having to turn off the lights is failing. You learned how to program and turned a profit on your first project. That sounds like success (albeit minor) to me.
Because for the last 10 years I've worked 16-18 hours a day, every day, with absolutely nothing to show from it.
Yeah, you should probably change that. That's unsustainable. You sound burned out. I'd be worse off than you are if I worked that much.
You need to exercise, you need a social life, you need things in your life that aren't work, and you need some damn down time. Don't just "book that holiday" (it's not a bad idea, but it's not enough). Stop working hard and start working smart. If it's not important, don't do it. If it is important, you probably want to be well-rested when you do it, which rules out 120-hour weeks.
Because 10 years later I'm suck in a day job as a programmer.
Well, if you drop back to an 8-hour day, you'll hate it a lot less. Give yourself a break. Most people don't hate being in day jobs because most people don't work so hard as to make themselves miserable. They show up at 9:00, leave around 5:30, socialize a bit at work, and once they've been at the job for a year or two, they figure out a way to work mainly on the parts of the job that they enjoy. You should try it.
And for a dirty secret: you can probably get away with 2-3 hours per day of actual work at most day jobs. I don't advise slacking to that extreme. It's bad for your career to fuck around, and even though you probably won't get fired, people will notice and not like you and it'll make your life unpleasant. But you're literally working an order of magnitude more, right now, than the minimum not to get fired.
Also, stop reading Techcrunch because the 25-year-olds whose startups turned into unicorns or thestrals or chimeras or whatever the fuck mythological creature they are using to describe hot-shit companies had so much parental lift (and luck) that it's useless to make a comparison.
You mention being stuck "as a programmer". Do you not like programming? If you don't like it, then stop doing it. That's not giving up. That's choosing not to do something that you don't enjoy. If you do like programming, then find your way to projects that you're enthusiastic about, and find a way to blow off or delegate the dreck work (see the above about slacking, and learn a bit about office politics).
Something I never wanted to be, I just wanted to build a business.
Then, you have three options. One: get some capital and start a business. If your social life is as pathetic as you've claimed it to be, then you probably have some savings. But don't do this until you've taken a break because starting your own business will call for some long hours... and you need some time to slack (relative to what you've been doing) and un-burn-out. Two: bootstrap a business using the time not spent on your day job (unless you're getting rapidly promoted, we've already gone over the fact that you shouldn't put more than 40-45 hours on it). You've shown that you can work smart but you need to work hard. Three: get into a top-5 MBA school. If you're a half-decent engineer than you're already smarter than 97% of Harvard MBA students although you may need some work on the social polish aspect. That's not going to help you as an entrepreneur but it'll get you into VC and then you can become a founder or startup executive after your time in VC.
I've lost some of the best years of my life behind a text editor and a dream.
15 to 25? Those aren't the best years of most peoples' lives. Being a teenager is terrible in the U.S., college is overhyped and socially disappointing for most people-- especially men-- and pretty much everyone from 22-25 is confused, rapidly losing touch with his previous self and likely falling out of contact with old friends, and working in a job that's below what college trained him to expect.
Most of the older people I know say that the best years of their lives are the last healthy years, typically meaning 50s and 60s. Until your health goes for good, it keeps getting better, and the end is usually not far after that. My mother said that the best years of her life were her 50s, except for the health issues (cancer) that she had toward the end of the decade (she died at 59). I think that's common: most older people are happier than when younger and don't want to go back to who they were or the life they had when they were younger. (Obviously, no one would turn down having the body and health of a 25-year-old forever, if that were an option, but almost no one thinks that those are the best years.)
So, no, you haven't lost the best years of your life. You are slowly becoming less physically attractive, but it's surprising how little that matters, and it's also easy to do something about. (If you stay in shape, you'll be considered good looking for a long time.) Don't worry about it.
Not to mention the money and friends I've lost along the way.
Well, again, you should fix that pattern. My advice: getting emotional about money "that got away" is pointless. It's business. Emotions put your eyes on the scoreboard rather than the ball. As for friends, you can always get in contact with old friends. They fell out of contact with you, just as you did with them, right? That happens, and people are pretty forgiving. It happens to all of us, especially those of us who work hard and are ridiculously busy.
Good luck. It doesn't sound like you're as much of a failure as you think you are. In fact, I'll bet that you learned a lot. You're just tired and need a rest.