A number has followed Melvin Hines for most of his adult life: 68. His freshman class at a high school in Albany, Georgia, began with 250 students. By senior year, 120 remained. Sixty-eight graduated. Hines did, then carried the missing 182 with him into rooms that seemed to belong to another country: the University of Georgia, Duke Law, Duke's Fuqua School of Business, consulting meetings, and eventually the company he built with Alex Pritchett.
The contrast was not subtle. Hines arrived at Georgia after an under-resourced education and met classmates who knew about test preparation, advanced courses, campus conventions, and the invisible choreography of getting ahead. His hometown celebrated his admission in the newspaper. On campus, he discovered that admission was merely the door. Some students had been trained to navigate everything behind it.
He studied economics because behavior fascinated him. Psychology could explain why people make choices, he later observed, but economics could attach numbers to the explanation. The subject gave him a language for the distance between talent and outcome. It also offered a way to ask a less sentimental question about inequality: what changes when the right incentive, information, or person arrives at the right time?
One class, three checkpoints
The hidden curriculum
Duke made the divide sharper. As a first-year law student, Hines was surrounded by second- and third-generation lawyers who appeared to know the vocabulary, extracurriculars, and exam strategy before class began. His first-semester results were poor. He wondered whether he belonged. It is a familiar institutional trick: present inherited knowledge as natural ability, then let the newcomer blame himself for arriving without it.
Hines stayed. He adjusted and eventually founded the Duke Forum for Law and Social Change. While still a law student, he was invited to teach first-year law students at nearby North Carolina Central University, with a focus on helping them remain in the program. The student who had doubted his own place was now helping other students keep theirs.
He added an MBA at Fuqua, a choice that gave him two intellectual toolboxes that did not always agree. In his telling, law teaches depth, criticism, and the detection of risk. Business school supplies options and action, sometimes faster than skepticism would advise. One discipline says, “Here is why this may fail.” The other asks, “What shall we try on Monday?” Upswing would eventually need both voices.
“When you find yourself in an unfamiliar environment, figure out what makes you stand out and use your differences to your advantage.”Melvin Hines
There was another education running alongside the degrees. Beginning as an undergraduate, Hines volunteered through Big Brothers Big Sisters. He mentored two boys and kept the relationship going until they graduated from high school, nearly nine years later. Persistence, in this version, was not an inspirational poster. It was showing up long enough to see what happened next.
A spare room and a small invoice
After Duke, Hines joined a business consulting firm. The most consequential connection there was indirect: a colleague introduced him to Alex Pritchett, a Georgian with software experience and a record of nonprofit work. In 2012, the two shared a house with other roommates. One room remained empty, so they declared it the brainstorming room. The phrase sounds grander than the furnishings probably were. Its purpose was serious. They wanted to build software for students who struggled in school.
In March 2013, an administrator in Durham asked them to make a tutoring scheduler for 60 high-school students. The school would pay $600. To the founders, the little contract felt like applause. They assembled the first version from existing software and bought a hosting package on eBay for about $9. The host failed within a week. Then, on the morning before the program was due to begin, the system returned. They walked into the launch without advertising the backstage farce.
The episode contains a tidy founder lesson, although tidiness arrived later. Validation did not require polished infrastructure. It required one administrator with a problem and two people willing to solve it. The primitive scheduler led to community-college customers in North Carolina, then a broader view of what students needed before tutoring could matter. A platform began accumulating around the original insight.
The useful backdoor
Need did not make fundraising easy. Durham had an active startup scene, but Hines found himself competing for attention with plenty of other young companies. Upswing took an accelerator opportunity that brought the founders to Austin, Texas. He later described the move as an alternative path that changed the company's trajectory. The phrase he uses is “backdoor,” not as a trick, but as a route ignored by the crowd at the front entrance.
The move fits a pattern in his story. At Georgia, difference became information. At Duke, unfamiliarity forced him to study the rules. In fundraising, geography became a variable rather than a verdict. Each time, the first route was crowded or poorly marked. His response was to examine the landscape until another opening appeared. “There is always a backdoor or alternative path,” he has said.
Austin gave Upswing room to raise money and grow. By the end of 2017, the company had raised $3 million from angels and institutional investors. Hines noticed a practical distinction between them. A larger mission-aligned investor could bring networks and operating knowledge along with the check, reducing the time founders spent constantly raising the next one. Capital was useful; context made it more useful.
After the pandemic, Hines and Pritchett moved the company back to the Triangle. They returned to a North Carolina startup community that Hines believed had developed more resources in their absence. The round trip is less a tale of leaving home than of using place deliberately. Founders are told to plant a flag. Hines treated location like any other product decision: choose the environment that solves the present constraint, then reconsider when the constraint changes.
Designing for the missed moment
Upswing's product grew into a collection of tutoring, assignment review, advising, early alerts, and engagement tools. The pieces share a point of view. A student can be surrounded by campus services and still experience no support at all. The tutoring center closes before a night shift ends. An advisor's calendar is full. A first-generation student does not know which office owns the problem. A working parent has no appetite for another portal and another password.
Hines and his team responded by reducing the distance between signal and assistance. Ana, Upswing's virtual assistant, uses text messages to send reminders, prompt replies, and direct students toward available resources. The important medium is not futuristic. It is SMS, the plain technology already sitting in a pocket. Cleverness resides in choosing the channel people answer.
The customer choice mattered just as much. Upswing concentrated on non-traditional and historically underserved students when much of education technology preferred the conventional campus consumer. The company worked with community colleges, minority-serving institutions, trade schools, and programs serving adults, parents, rural learners, and first-generation students. In 2024, Upswing reported 66 active customers reaching more than 515,000 students; 51 percent of those customers were historically Black colleges and universities or Hispanic-serving institutions.
That year, Social Finance's UP Fund announced a $2.6 million investment in the company. It was a revealing kind of capital: money organized around both repayment and measurable impact. Hines has said that Upswing's investors care about returns and mission. The balance suits a founder whose education trained him to interrogate both the mechanism and the result.
“I started Upswing to help students from communities like mine to get a fair opportunity at upward mobility.”Melvin Hines
The long advantage
Thirteen years is a long time to explain the same customer. It can also become an advantage. By 2025, colleges were confronting a smaller population of traditional-age students while enrolling more people whose schedules, families, jobs, and preparation did not match the residential model. The learner Upswing had treated as central was becoming harder for the sector to dismiss as peripheral.
Hines's stated ambition now reaches beyond persistence to the transition into work. He wants Upswing to help connect education with workforce-development programs and lasting economic mobility. It is an expansion, but not a change of subject. The subject remains the same student, followed farther down the road.
His preferred metaphor is a race with unequal starting lines. The point is not to pretend every runner begins together. It is to make the course a little faster and easier for the person starting behind. That posture is practical rather than theatrical. It asks where friction lives, which message gets answered, which appointment can be booked, and whether assistance arrived while a decision was still reversible.
The 68 graduates from Albany remain the clearest explanation of the work. Hines cannot rewrite that class list. He can build for the next student approaching the point where an institution loses sight of them. Upswing began with a room, an invoice, and hosting that nearly vanished. What endured was the operating thesis: notice earlier, reach directly, and keep the path visible long enough for someone to finish.