About

The Uplift Index began with a straightforward observation: the tools public health uses to measure emotional wellbeing are built to activate at the moment of disclosure — when someone identifies as struggling, seeks care, or answers a survey. But distress rarely begins there. It begins earlier, quieter, and largely out of view.

Search behavior occupies that earlier interval. When someone types why do I feel so empty into a search engine at midnight on a private device, they are expressing something real — something that would not surface in any clinical intake, survey instrument, or help-seeking interaction. The Uplift Index is an attempt to observe that layer of experience responsibly, at the population level, and ask what it might tell communities about where strain is present before it reaches crisis.

This isn't the first time Mark Hoashi has looked for signal in places institutional systems aren't watching. In 2006, while completing his M.S. at Rochester Institute of Technology, he built in collaboration with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Project 404: Child Not Found — a system that repurposed donated corporate 404 error traffic to display missing children information to users who would otherwise see nothing. The same instinct is at work here: internet infrastructure generates signals continuously that nobody is paying attention to in the right way. Sometimes paying attention differently changes what's possible.

Mark has spent twenty years building and scaling technology ventures — from a digital media company with global offices and $45M in annual revenue, to a consumer brand in 300+ retail locations, to a mobile platform that reached 100,000 users in three months. His work has been covered in Forbes, Fortune, and Wired. He has appeared on CBS Evening News — Eye on America and been interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta for CNN.

The Uplift Index is independent, early-stage, and looking for the right collaborators to take it further.