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Tom Ashbrook was a longtime writer and editor for The Boston Globe. In The Leap, he tells how he became one of the founders of HomePortfolio.Inc. with college friend Rolly Rouse. This excerpt chronicles a turning point -- after months of searching for venture capital, scraping by financially, trying to sell their dream -- homeportfolio.com went live.

Behind the fund-raising storm and fury, a quiet, beautiful thing was happening. The fully functioning HomePortfolio Web site was finally coming together. We'd been told to simplify, and the Web was great for that. It demanded simplicity. Elegance. Forget the bells and whistles. Focus on the main thing.

And the main thing was finding wonderful home-design products. Premium products, not in the sense of snobbish or slathered in gold, but in the sense of truly excellent quality. Products that would service and last, with top-tier design and materials and workmanship. People were tired of junk that broke. When they could have it, they wanted the top-of-the-line. People were tired of mass-produced homes. When they could manage, they wanted unique home-design products that expressed their personal tastes and aspirations. And people didn't want to have to search forever for the right products for their homes. Women, especially, with everything else they were juggling, didn't have the time. But women were often the ones with the most demanding eye, the ones who took responsibility for making their personal living environment a place of comfort and wonder.

Month by month, gasping along on our shoestring finances, we had pulled the pieces together. We had designed a service that had never existed before the Web -- that could never exist without the Web. From a thousand trade shows and showrooms and catalogues and architects' and designers' suggestions, we had built the core of a database of the world's best home-design products. They were beautiful. And the software Shawn had woven around them would help people easily find exactly what they wanted. And if users found something they liked and wanted to see more products like that one -- whether it was a carved mantelpiece, or a copper sink, or an offbeat Windsor chair, or a leaded window -- HomePortfolio would scan the database and pull up their options.

Seung Park, a terrific young graphic artist, was working with us now, producing the highest-quality photo scans anywhere on the Web. Images that were up-to-date, luscious, detailed, almost tactile. And when people found the things they wanted to make their house their home, they could save those images and product information to a personal online portfolio with the click of a button. They could learn where the nearest retail showrooms for that product were. And soon, we knew, they would be able to order right there, on the Web, if that's what they wanted to do.

It wasn't our full vision. The Web couldn't handle that yet. But it would, in time. For now, we would offer all the Web could deliver. And it was a lot. To a lot of people. Month by month, the number of Americans online was soaring. And we would soar with them.

Night after night we worked, tweaking, coding, honing, refining. We were hardworking churchmice. And in January, when the snow was deep and the cupboards were bare, and we had tested our creation, the new HomePortfolio site went live. Shawn poked his head through my door, grinning and twinkling.

Excerpted from THE LEAP, A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND MADNESS IN THE INTERNET GOLD RUSH, by Tom Ashbrook. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

"The whole world can see it now," he said.

"You mean it's up?"

"It's up!"

I turned to my keyboard, brought up the Web browser, and for the first time ever typed in our electronic address to the world, watching it grow letter by letter across the screen: www.homeportfolio.com.

And there it was. Clean, beautiful, and working. The Internet would change the world in a million categories. We had just changed it in ours.

At last.