Before LinkedIn, there was David Rockefeller - the grandson of America’s first billionaire and, by many accounts, the most connected man of the 20th century.
Calling him a “networker” doesn’t do him justice. Rockefeller didn’t just meet people - he **mapped the world** through them. Over a lifetime, he recorded the details of roughly **100,000 individuals** he met across continents, storing each meeting on a **white 3x5-inch index card**.
The result was extraordinary: nearly **200,000 cards** filed into a custom-built **five-foot-high Rolodex**, an electronic machine that sat in his Rockefeller Center office for half a century.
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