I don't think you've addressed his criticism. A usable interface that works and converts still may solve no actual problem.

His concern isn't unreasonable. Look at the output of a lot of design schools and design agencies. The primary skills seem to be making things that look beautiful and appealing, without a whole lot of concern about end-user value.

That's unsurprising when you consider how many design-school people end up in advertising and marketing, the purpose of which is to manipulate consumer behavior without regard to actual value delivered. Indeed, a concern for end-user value is a positive handicap in that environment; I have friends who have had to eventually change careers because they started to think too much about the impact of what they did.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of those companies are solving relatively small problems compared to Google, Paypal or EBay. They're all video sharing, blogging or design specific sites, and the ones which are successful or important are not successful because of their design (eg. Youtube), or have designs which are painful to use (eg. Slideshare).

By all means celebrate companies with designers, but saying "designers created $billions of value" is a bit of a stretch when there are so many counter-examples.

Yes I agree with your first sentence, that's the point we need more to designers to step up to the challenge...We didn't say what you quoted, we specifically say in order "billions worth of value created by tech startups with designer co-founders" and also say, "Nearly every designer founder has a technical co-founder and some have technical backgrounds which furthers the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration"... also see previous comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3359176 hopefully this is also a challenge to the next generation of designers to step up and ship something of consequence in collaboration with other brilliant folks from different background like great engineers who have been doing it for decades in deep tech... design+tech entrepreneurship is still in it's infancy... I do know that we need to be proactively driving new ideas and not be so reactive. “They have checkins, and group coupons, and native apps, and just got a valuation of thirty billion; WE need to have checkins! We need group coupons! Bring on the native apps!” I hope future designer-entrepreneurs can be more proactive and present a state that doesn’t yet exist. Addressing latent needs ESPECIALLY in emerging markets and coming up re-framed business models for the other 99% of the population.

Yes, I read your caveat, but the overall gist of your article is still that designers create billions of dollars of value. I just don't think there's enough evidence to warrant that implication - particularly when there are other startups which have butt-ugly, hard-to-use websites and make even more money.

I used the word "with" and didn't say they created it by themselves, obviously it takes a lot of people... Part of the gist is encouraging designers to believe they can and therefore try, hopefully in collaboration, especially since talent is getting stretched in our bubble here