Did you use this for due diligence to verify that the data reported by the entrepreneur in the pitch was good or you were looking at some companies in a specific space and checking the company that has more orders?
Honesty is in shorter supply than you think in the consulting industry (with good exceptions). I have been around long enough to see fabricated resumes, bait-and-switch of candidates, and dedicated engineers that were not so dedicated.
What surprises me the most is that you have managers that not only end up getting in business with them but they are not able to find what it is really going on. And in some big companies some managers know what is going on and are fine with it!
Yes, more than 10 years ago when I was hired as engineer 2 in a startup, I had to work with a remote team working as contractors. The manager was in Alaska but the team was in India. The CEO used them to create the first prototype of the product and raise money.
We worked with them for 3 months. I tried to train them but there was a big ethical problem. It was clear they were not honest. We supposedly had 3 engineers. One was good, the other 2 were not good at all. It was clear that they were not working full time on our project and the good engineer was working even less with us (pretty much when the CTO was having discussion with the guy in Alaska). There were times when he asked: "Did you do task X?" Answer: "Yes!" CTO: "Can you show me the code?" contractor: "I did not do it."
There was also a language gap and the good guy ended up leaving to work with Microsoft.
We let them go and we started put that codebase in maintenance mode.
At that time we also got a new talented designer and we started building the new features in a different codebase.
We had a guy that before COVID interview remotely as iOS engineering contract. When we came on the job was not good. Our boss heard him on the phone talking in his native language asking saying something like "you need to help me here, I do not know how to do it."