There's survivorship bias here. Where's the list of companies that pivoted to oblivion?
Basically, he just didn't have enough follow through on specific ideas to either validate or disprove them.
I should have walked away sooner than I did, because we went nowhere.
In general, a pivot needs to come from evidence that it will increase sales, and stay within your core competency.
The CEO insisted it wasn't pivoting, it was "refinement", but he also had a really annoying tendency to redefine X to mean "what we do", so he could tell clients and investors "we do X".
When we were discussing me joining the company there was a very clear plan for the product and the path to revenue. Unfortunately, he had one meeting that completely shook his confidence in that direction. After that meeting it was something new every week.
We would build the feature of the week and then it wouldn't immediately catch on and he would decide to scrap it and start something new.
I finally jumped ship when it became clear he wasn't going to commit to a vision and his next idea was that we should make it a social platform.