[convexing]

Broadly speaking, the people who have significant, nontrivial expertise in the field is limited (to a first approximation) to

- students of Hinton/LeCun/Bengio/Ng, and/or

- members of Google/Facebook/Baidu's deep learning group.

An actual deep learning expert can have unrivalled access to infrastructure, excellent colleagues, data, and compensation, at any of Google/Facebook/Baidu etc.

Given this backdrop, it's less surprising that a significant number of the current crop of deep learning companies are unimpressive technologically - those with actual expertise have much better opportunities.