Couldn't this be applied to startup ideas? Say you have savings to last you 12 months. Try one startup idea (/MVP) every month for 12/e = 4 months. Then keep going producing 1 MVP per month until you find one that looks more promising than the best of the first four. If the article is right then with a probability of 36.8% you will have found the best idea with some time to spare in your 12 months to make some money with it. No?
No, because you can go back to a better idea anytime you want to do so. If you estimated that you have 12 months of savings and that it takes you a month to build an MVP and six months to take an MVP to ramen profit, you should spend the first six months building six MVPs, then evaluate them and pick the best to work on for another six months.
Except the number of startup ideas is not fixed, just the number of months, so you haven't exactly found the "best idea" -- more that you've found the best month+idea pairing. It might still be an okay approximation if your goal is to build a good-enough MVP, but it's not exactly the same formula since there are any number of ideas you might have to work with.
