His startup was acquired by Cisco so not weird for Cisco's CPO to know the startup's founder/CEO. That said, not sure how knowledge on speech translation means he's totally qualified on rewriting infra/networking/cybersecurity (Cisco's primary fields of operation) code. Unless the legacy code expected to be rewritten is constrained on related services/solutions, e.g. CVP or/and WebEx.

His job isn’t to rewrite all the code. His job is to make the market satisfied that Cisco is “more AI” than competitors.