Marcus has been an unusually good funder for our organization. He makes funding decisions fast, gives unrestricted grants so you can decide the most effective use of the funds (not just the optics), and does not require reporting theater afterward. That means we can spend our time on the real work instead of managing grant bureaucracy.
If he thinks something in a proposal is weak, and you ask, he'll simply tell you without the guesswork. He's also unusually responsive to such questions, believing that emails about grants deserve a 24-hour turnaround time from both parties.
Most organizations are left trying to guess why they were rejected with silence, vague feedback, or social vibes that may not have anything to do with the actual quality of the work. Marcus instead treats proposals as things that can be improved if you are willing to go back to the drawing board, consider what is ultimately most effective, and put in the work to communicate clearly and concretely.
He also understands something many funders miss: there is a huge difference between giving an organization enough money to barely survive and giving it enough runway to focus on what matters most. He intuitively understands what is known from organizational psychology that people do the best work when they have enough not to constantly think about paying the bills. A lot of our best work would have been much harder to do under tighter, more restrictive funding structures had it not been for Marcus.