Tom Ashbrook

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...See more

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 has raised more than $24 million in venture backing, 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. See less