My experience now shows that a necessary condition for being a "CEO of a well-known Bitcoin ASIC company" is to understand very little about digital logic design and compensate this with chutzpah. All publicly available information points to them having only part-time design talent or to making drastic shortcuts to the design workflow.

In particular the statement about "a lot faster" in a "next day" call, without running the simulations, points me to some bullshit artist.

I can only commiserate with you about not having any trusted friend to discuss your ideas without being worried about them being stolen. Thankfully I'm not in this position and have some contacts who wouldn't jeopardize friendship for a quick sale.