From my experience, "Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results" isn't about hiring a CEO, it's about hiring in general.

Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.

The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role

The folly is thinking that getting hiring right is the solution at all.

As has been pointed out a) leaders matter, b) the difference in impact between great and mediocre/poor leadership is massive, c) even if you hire a great leader you can get poor results.

It follows then that spending more effort to find just the right person is not enough. You must also examine your overall organizational culture, your investors culture, your unspoken assumptions about the goals of your organization, etc etc.

And yes great leaders do all of this - of course - it becomes obvious upon reading my comment. But the point is great leaders doing this is not enough. The organization must be on the same page. You can lead a horse to water etc etc. And yes the leader can "Re-organize" but at that point you may find yourself faced with throwing the baby out with the bathwater unavoidably.

Leaders are necessary. And hiring is hard. But there is no one golden calf like "hire the perfect leader" that will solve a problem.

As with most things worth doing: you have to do it. Doing it is hard. And you might still not get the results you want.

And about startups. For a while the Stanford MBA + MIT CS founder duo guaranteed a pavlovian response from VC regardless their actual experience.