Just recently I came to a realization, people and organisations exist in a competency / incompetency matrix.
The competent orgs with incompetent people are your blue chips and "traditional" companies. They ship stuff, have customers, grow along with the overall market and economy and are abble to survive most non-existential threats and down-turns and even existential ones from time to time. All, or most, the competency is institutional, recorded in implicit knowledge held by people and various tools and processes. Unless those companies loose that knowledge for some reason, things are good.
Competent orgs with competent people are incredible places, e.g. Amazon. They grow like crazy, rarely screw up and develop. They ship and have happy customers, they innovate. These places are hard to come by, harder to create and even harder to maintain.
Then you have incompetent orgs with competent people. By definition start-ups, those only reach competency when they serve, sucessfully and not depending on outside funding, markets and customers for a while. Doing things right, those orgs can create orgabisational competency based on the people competency.
And then there are incompetent orgs with incompetent people. Places were you think, as you said, you haluzionate all your training and experience. The only thing standing between a start-up (incompetent org and competent people) and such a nightmare is leadership. The thing that allows everyone to pretend to not be obe of those doomed places is endless cash. Sooner or later, those places come crushing down.