Hey @CharlieM — great question. I’ll give a short answer and a longer answer.
The short answer is, no, I haven’t found that entrepreneurs or business people use this idea very much.
The longer answer:
I do think that the idea is useful, but I think this isn’t as intuitive or as widespread amongst business operators as it is amongst investors.
Why is this the case? I think the underlying frame that most operators have is Action Produces Information — that is, whatever informational benefits that might be had from taking action far exceeds the benefits of analysis … even base rate analysis!
That said, I have reached for base rate analysis in the past few years, mostly as a way to anchor my appraisal of some concrete situation. (I am not an investor). The most recent example I can think of was a discussion about a particular customer, where I asked for overall retention metrics for the most relevant (or comparable) customer cohort.
One parting thought: there’s a quote from Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things that haunts me:
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
(…) I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.
Which I think captures this bias towards taking action to generate information (or finding a solution) instead of analysing probabilistically.