The CEO was not a fraud and given the genuine fully-established and world class credentials of his technical reports in previous engagements, entirely unlikely

The CEO was not a fraud and given the genuine fully-established and world class credentials of his technical reports in previous engagements, entirely unlikely that he could have faked it with that crowd. No. It seems he had adjusted per prevailing and current norms of SV. Beyond that clarification, I think it irresponsible to name names. This wasn't a case of "fraud" - Peter Principle ruled the day. Both CTO and DoE had in fact lead a successful very large scale internet product company, which is the reason they were tapped. It just happens that this domain was far more nuanced and complex than the domain of their previous victory tour. Also, as expected, they (including the super enthusiastic junior engineers that kept pushing for "microservices") have all moved on. This is just how the industry works.