In 2009, a stranger sent me $16,000 and asked me to pay it forward.
I'd been rejected for seven student loans. One last year of college standing between me and a degree I'd worked too hard to walk away from. Then a cashier's check arrived in the mail with a note I still keep framed above my desk.
Everything I've built since, the company, the book, the work I do on stage, is me keeping that promise.
The note I keep above my desk
No name. No strings. A $16,000 cashier's check arrived in the mail with one request:
“We hope that at some time in your successful future you may find someone in need and ‘pay this gift forward.’”
Flint friends grateful for Kettering University · March 2009
I framed it. I've been answering it ever since.
Success Isn't Only Going Up
At TEDxPontiac 2026, Marc took the iconic red circle to deliver “Downward Growth”, a reframe of the hardest, slowest seasons of life not as failure, but as the roots that quietly prepare us to rise.
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What I'm Building
Speaker
I keynote for organizations that want their teams thinking bigger about what generosity, technology, and community can do together. Audiences from Black Tech Saturdays to Kiwanis pitch stages to corporate offsites in between.
Bring Marc to Your StageFounder
Lite Raise is the operating system I wish nonprofits had when my family was leaning on them growing up. Today it's the platform helping churches, schools, and community organizations run compliant and raise more.
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Dreaming of Success is the book I wrote for the version of me who needed it at 22, short, direct, and built around what actually moved the needle, not what sounded good on a poster.
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Build what's missing.
Lift the next person up.
2027 IPO Business Accelerator
Six weeks. Twelve founders. One demo day.
A virtual program for early-stage entrepreneurs who want to move from idea to investable, covering due diligence, financial modeling, pitch craft, and the parts of building a company that nobody teaches you until you've already gotten them wrong.
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Dreaming of Success
Most success books are 300 pages of one idea. This one is the opposite: short, blunt, and built around a single question: what are you doing today that your future self will thank you for? Written for the version of me at 22 who needed it. Useful for anyone at the start of something hard.
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If your organization needs a keynote, your accelerator needs a mentor, or your nonprofit needs the kind of fundraising tools that used to only exist for the big guys, those are all the same conversation for me.
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