Dotcom entrepreneur Jeremy Tang counts costs after a dotbombing raid

A birthday is generally a time for introspection. Just past his 33rd, Jeremy Tang - who has watched his dotcom turn into a dotbomb - has plenty to think about.

Mr Tang has begun closing down Rebound International, an award-winning company that used the Internet to help suppliers and retailers in Asia and North America move unwanted inventory.

During his career, the Australian-born executive has ridden several trends: cigar smoking, the China goods craze of the 1997 handover, and the huge run-up of the technology stock market. But Mr Tang says it was the subsequent tech plunge that taught him a few harsh lessons.

'If there is one thing I have learned . . . in the last 18 months, it is just humility,' he said.

'All these young Net entrepreneurs, people like myself, have been very lucky in a morbid sort of a way to have experienced such a heavy boom-bust cycle in such a compressed period of time. Because as long as we learn from that, or as long as I learn from that, it is an incredibly valuable piece of business experience.'

Mr Tang co-founded Rebound with Marybeth Dee, revamping her small liquidator called Tradepac. They estimated the global market for consumer goods that companies could not sell on home turf for branding, relationship or late shipping reasons was about US$100 billion a year.

But few firms handled such inventory in Asia.