Entrepreneur of the Year Award – Barter Economy Category

Today a friend alerted me to the “One Red Paperclip” adventure being lived out on the internet by Kyle MacDonald. In July 2005, he started out with one red paperclip, which he intended to gradually trade for bigger and better things until he eventually got a house. A wonderful, bizarre idea – with little chance of success, right? Well, so far he’s managed to go from a paperclip up to a cube van, which in the most recent transaction just got swapped for a complete recording contract. If you ever needed evidence of the maxim of mutually-beneficial trade, here it is.