Tom Nicholas, an HBS professor, wrote a book about the history of VC (1) which spends the first chapter of the book talking about the whaling industry and how it created the venture structure we know today. Many whaling voyages failed to find whales, and some outright sank or disappeared, but some came home full of whale oil. He found the parallels in the data striking. It is a great book and a good companion to Mallaby's Power Law.

Fun fact: his source for whaling data was a book by Alexander Starbuck.

1. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42449471