>1. "I have kids that I can use my vacation time for". If you think this way, you shouldn't apply for a job at a startup. You need to be prepared that there is a good chance for you to not spend a minute with your family, nor to have a vacation, over next months/years.
This is 100% a ridiculous belief that investors try to cram into founders' heads so they can get more free labor (on top of the already-depressed salaries many investors already mandate). It is not good for your company to overwork its employees, even when the company is a startup.
Some flexibility re: crunch time or emergency changes is reasonable, some expectation of working some evenings here or there, but this belief that someone should go weeks, months, or years with minimal family or vacation time is bonkers. Only the desperate fall for it, and only the naive manager tries to enforce it.
Investors may promote it because they're effectively running the equivalent of a shiny sweatshop. Neither founders nor employees should accept this type of abuse.
My advice is to never take a job that even hints these are the expected working conditions.
>2. From what I learned, startups don't necessarily hire the best technical person. The are looking for the best motivated one. From what you write, it may appear that you are not really motivated/interested.
Again, this is a red flag for an employer you don't want to work for. Not everyone hires strictly based on technical merit, and that's fine -- culture fit is important. But if that culture's demands are that you work 65 hours a week for them and smile while doing it, you must run. These guys are not attracting real technical talent. They are attracting desperate collegiates looking for lottery tickets. Once you're no longer a desperate collegiate, you don't want those people to be your colleagues.
> Got rejected by, probably, 100 companies, and got only two offers. And not because I am a jerk or technically incompetent. It's just in most cases I was not really interested, and I believe people saw that. So, it looked really strange and unfortunate to me, but I totally understand why it happened, and don't blame anyone except for myself.
That you went to 100 interviews and got only 2 offers is a big red flag also. My experience is that good help will get an offer on a much higher portion of their interviews than that, maybe something between 30-50%? As stated previously perhaps you're just targeting the wrong companies, but if you're a skilled developer and you have a 2% offer rate, you are doing something seriously wrong. Maybe it's asking for too much for your skill level, maybe it's not washing well enough before the interview, I don't know what it is, but that's way low.
I'm not trying to take away from the sentiment that job seekers be prepared, good candidates, but it sounds like there's a lot about your approach that could do with some tweaking.