> I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.

This entirely. I've been CTO at a handful of startups, most recently one that sold for a very large sum of money — and the successful ones are almost always led by people who keep things dirt simple: focus on the customer, execute quickly, communicate clearly, keep costs low, and keep the technology simple. That's basically it. Just a few simple things, applied relentlessly.

The ones that failed were always the total opposite — not listening to their customers, poor communication across the org, blowing their runway on "we need Google-scale infrastructure," switching languages or frameworks halfway through the project, and so on.