Garry Tan is a partner and a rockstar. He's given a plenty of amazing pointers and w/o him (and other partners) we would've gotten plenty of other things wrong.
That said, Garry can guide us. His job isn't do design for us... that onus is still no us! Hence, please blame us for poor design.;-)
I'm not convinced that redesigns done in isolation are useful. As the AA designer's reply to dcurtis indicated [1]--in the prototypical example of this kind of stunt--the design can't operate in isolation from the structure and goals of the organization (even if those are dysfunctional).
These "blank page" redesigns disrespect the hard work these YC companies are doing A/B testing and talking to users to improve what really matters: conversions.
I checked the source of both sites, none of them use any front-end A/B testing services. I think it's incredibly over the top to call this disrespectful.
They're great for self promotion, they're great for self improvement, and he is giving them out to the companies!
Completely different contexts. These are startups with fire at their backs running as fast as they can. They don't have time to be methodical and their brands are completely in flux. They have far fewer stakeholders to please and much quicker reaction time. In short: they are not American Airlines.
An outside contribution at this stage is as valuable as anything the companies themselves have the resources to put together. Meanwhile, we all see different angles to attack these problems while learning about a great designer. Everyone wins, and it sounds like it matters a great deal.
Agreed about the value of outside perspectives to resource-poor startups. The (purposefully provocative) point I was trying to make with American Airlines was simply that in all cases design is applied in service to goals which may not be obvious to an outsider.
Of course, an outsider might see what users want more easily than the product team.
