Tom Ashbrook
Award winning journalist,
a founder of HomePortfolio.com
and author of The Leap.
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Tom
Ashbrook is an award-winning journalist and a founder of
HomePortfolio Inc., creators of HomePortfolio.com, the leading
Internet destination for premium home design products. A longtime
foreign correspondent and editor for the Boston Globe, he
spent ten years in Asia, working and reporting from India, Hong
Kong, and Japan. He was awarded the Livingston Prize for national
reporting and held a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University
before launching a second career as an Internet entrepreneur.
Ashbrook began his writing career
at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, covering the
exodus of Vietnamese refugees and the post-Mao opening of China.
His earlier work included roustabout and dynamiting jobs on oil
exploration crews in Prudhoe Bay and the Alaskan Yukon, a teaching
stint with the Yale-China Association in Hong Kong, scripting and
dubbing Chinese kung fu films for international distribution,
on-air hosting of primetime television in Hong Kong, and research
jobs for Illinois Lt. Governor Neil F. Hartigan and U.S. Rep.
Leslie C. Arends.
Launched out of a third bedroom in
1996 and live on the Web since January, 1998, HomePortfolio
received a recent infusion of $48 million in May 2000, and has
over one hundred employees and offices in Newton, MA; Chicago; Los
Angeles;
Charlotte; and New York. Described
in the February, 2000 issue of House & Garden magazine
as the Internet’s "uber-site" for home design, H&G’s
editor wrote: "HomePortfolio.com blows my mind."
Born and raised on a farm in
Bloomington, Illinois, Ashbrook lives in Newton, Massachusetts
with his wife, Danielle, and his three children.
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