When the 32-year-old founder of fintech startup Credible Stephen Dash left Australia for San Francisco, he knew one person and took just one suitcase full of clothes.
Three and a half years, numerous awards and $US12.7 million of funding later he is returning for an annual visit, in search of the tech talent he says has become prohibitively expensive in the US.
Dash established Credible to attack what he says was a unique problem in the US financial services sector, where students pay significantly higher rates for their loans. Adopting the increasingly popular online marketplace model, Credible created a site or platform where borrowers can seek out offers from vetted lenders. 
"I basically saw that people were getting ripped off on their student loans," Dash tells The Australian Financial Review. "I saw it as an ideal entry point to build a business around a relationship with a young professional, who is making their first major financial decision. In a sense, after that you may have got them for years."
His idea has taken off, and since winning a category at the high-profile startup event Launch Festival in 2014, the company has secured investment from significant backers including the co-founder of US peer-to-peer lending giant Lending Club Soul Htite, and Australian venture capital firm Carthona Capital.
It has also picked up important early clients, including becoming the official endorsed platform of the American Medical Association for student loans, and about 100 similar partnerships.
Dash says the main growing pain for his company is the need for skilled staff. With another capital raising likely later in the year, the company is looking to scale up significantly on its 52 staff, mainly with software engineers.
While some local tech startups have bemoaned the tough battle for talent in Australia, Dash says that in comparison to Silicon Valley it is much easier.
"In San Francisco literally on every block and every building you have startups. It is a huge part of the labour force there," he says.
The opportunity to stay in Australia while working for a fast-growing Silicon Valley company is one Dash thinks will appeal to ambitious local coders. He says he is specifically finding it difficult to source enough talent with skills in the application framework Ruby on Rails, and thinks Australian coders will warm to the idea.
Carthona Capital partner Dean Dorrell, who previously worked with Dash at Mark Carnegie's private equity, venture capital and advisory firm M.H. Carnegie, says he initially backed Credible based on his confidence in the founder's ability to achieve his goals.
He says backing early-stage companies is often down to trusting a founder, rather than their business pitch, and that he knew Dash to be a very smart, hard worker.
"Credible is on the path to becoming a multi-billion-dollar company - a massive market, a unique value proposition of giving customers choice and putting them first, an A-grade team to execute the strategy, and an investor list with deep domain expertise," Dorrell says.
Dash meanwhile says he views his role as focusing on the fundamentals of the growing business, rather than plotting a future exit for backers.
"I heard a great quote that said great businesses are bought not sold, he says. "If you build a great business that is fundamentally sound, which has customers that want to return, then the rest will take care of itself. Good fundamentals in a business do not lie over the long term."