Mr Dong started his own software company Trunk.ly, and has bookmarked himself a place at the Silicon Valley headquarters of "technology superstars" Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
Mr Hurley and Mr Chen sold the internet site YouTube in 2006 for $US1.65 billion to Google. The pair then founded a new company, Avos, which has now acquired Mr Dong's Trunk.ly programme to help power relaunched social-networking site Delicious.com.
Mr Dong set up Trunk.ly last year alongside Melbourne-based business partner Tim Bull, who came from global accounting firm Pricewater-houseCoopers to join the start-up venture in 2009.
The entrepreneurs named their product for its luggage-like capabilities - Trunk.ly lets online users create an automated shared storage space for bookmarked internet links.
The software collects every link that users share or "like" on websites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and stores them in one place to make them easy to find.
Mr Dong is no newcomer to the software industry, despite being a polytechnic student. He has already tasted success with a start-up technology venture in his native China, but that initial experience left him "burnt-out" and questioning whether he wanted more.
After he sold his first photo-blogging venture, the 33-year-old and his wife spent a year travelling the world and looking for a new place to settle.
Initially declined an immigration visa from both Australia and New Zealand because his Chinese degree in mechanical engineering was deemed not to meet qualification standards, Mr Dong enrolled as an international student in the polytechnic's bachelor of information technology in January.
Trunk.ly has been developed as a result of his year-long study project.
"The beauty of the IT degree here is that the polytech gives you a chance to develop and work on you own idea, yet [as students] we're able to retain our own intellectual property," he said.
His peers in the IT programme said Mr Dong's success was an inspiration to them.
Mr Dong would not say how lucrative the sale of Trunk.ly was. He planned to use the revenue he earned to gain residency and begin a family.
A relocation to Silicon Valley to assist with the development of Trunk.ly to the Delicious site was on the cards, although Mr Dong said he would like to retain links with Dunedin and return to raise a family.
Trunk.ly was pitched to investors in the United States, China, Australia and New Zealand, but it was not until they met Mr Chen and Mr Hurley, that "anyone got it".
"They understood immediately what and where we wanted it to go," Mr Dong said.
Avos chief executive Mr Hurley said there was a shared vision.
"It became clear from the first discussion ... that our visions for the future of bookmarking and discovery were closely aligned," Mr Hurley said.
The technology and insights of Mr Dong and Mr Bull would accelerate the link-saving and searching capabilities of Delicious, he said.
