Marc Stöckli is an entrepreneur, board member, and investor based in Switzerland. He co-founded and led Totemo AG, a leading cybersecurity company, for over two decades before its successful sale. Marc also served as Global Chair of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, guiding strategy and governance for 20,000 members worldwide. He is the author of the forthcoming book Make Boards Work, which helps entrepreneurs turn their boards into powerful assets for growth.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [05:05] Why Marc Stöckli launched an early cybersecurity company focused on secure email
- [07:08] The infamous board meeting on 9/11 that sparked Marc’s lifelong interest in boards
- [10:54] How handwritten note-taking improves reflection and decision-making during board meetings
- [13:42] How narrowing focus and innovating internal email encryption helped Totemo succeed
- [19:25] The realities of co-founder conflict and rebuilding trust after a business dispute
- [27:10] What it takes to lead the global board of a 20,000-member organization like the EO
- [33:20] The core principles that make boards move from “required” to “vital” for company growth
- [43:58] How Marc applies “boardroom principles” to family life
In this episode…
Most entrepreneurs know they need a board, but few know how to make it truly work for them. Too often, boards feel like a legal requirement instead of a strategic advantage. So how can business leaders transform their boards into powerful catalysts for growth and innovation?
According to Marc Stöckli, a global leadership expert and board strategist, the key lies in redefining how boards function — from ego-driven oversight to collaborative, high-performing teams. He highlights that effective boards depend on trust, structure, and curiosity over judgment. By aligning strategy, behavior, and clear communication, boards can move from passive to pivotal and unlock better decision-making, stronger leadership, and sustainable business results.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran talks with Marc Stöckli about how to make boards work as strategic assets. They discuss lessons from Marc’s entrepreneurial journey, the principles of great board governance, and how to overcome ego and conflict in the boardroom. Marc also shares how his “18 Summers” philosophy helps leaders build stronger family relationships alongside business success.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
- Kiteworks
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
- EO Global Leadership Conference (GLC)
- David Anderson on LinkedIn
- The Family Board Meeting: You Have 18 Summers to Create Lasting Connection with Your Children by Jim Sheils
Quotable Moments:
- “What does it take for a board to consistently really be of value and not just be a mere necessity?”
- “For me, note-taking is much more about internalizing my knowledge and my thinking than about needing the notes to revisit them.”
- “I always say I lead an organization with 20,000 members, where every single one of the 20,000 thinks they know better than me.”
- “Why not elevate it to something truly valuable — and it is so valuable if set in place correctly — it can be so incredibly powerful.”
- “The biggest luxury I have as an entrepreneur is that I have a fairly high degree over my agenda.”
Action Steps:
- Build a board that challenges and supports you: A diverse mix of perspectives drives better decisions and keeps leadership accountable.
- Establish clear board structures and routines: Consistent agendas, preparation, and follow-ups transform meetings from formalities into engines of progress.
- Encourage curiosity over ego in the boardroom: Replacing “I know” with “help me understand” fosters collaboration and smarter strategic thinking.
- Bridge the information gap with your board: Regular, transparent communication equips members to provide meaningful input and guidance.
- Treat board preparation as reflection time: Writing thorough updates clarifies priorities, surfaces challenges early, and strengthens leadership discipline.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about how companies can leverage your board. That’s the board of directors. Board of advisors to drive business growth. My guest today is Marc Stöckli
He is the author of a forthcoming book on that topic. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
John Corcoran: 00:19
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:36
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, every week we have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies and organizations.
And we’ve had Netflix, Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, Activision Blizzard, LendingTree. Go to check out the archives. Lots of great episodes for you to check out. And before we get into that, this episode is brought to you by Rise25, our company where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that?
We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast. We do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution. And we also invented what some are calling the Wix of B2B podcasting. It’s our platform podcast Copilot.
So to learn more about it, go to our website rise25.com. Or you can email our team at support@rise25.com. All right, I’m excited to have today’s guest. His name is Marc Stöckli.
He’s an entrepreneur. He’s a board member. He’s an investor, former CEO. He is the Co-founder and former CEO of Totemo AG. It was cybersecurity.
It still is a cybersecurity company that he led for over two decades. And he’s held a number of leadership positions, including with the 20,000-member Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which I’ve been a member of for a number of years. I even attended the Global Leadership Conference where Marc was on stage leading that event. And so he has an extensive experience working with boards, even at that high level and in with all kinds of smaller boards as well, and even doing form trainings and things like that. And so his forthcoming book, Make Boards Work – Unleash your Board from Required to Vital, is going to be coming out and covering all of these topics.
So I’m really excited about that. And he’s based out of Switzerland. So Marc, I’m so excited to have you here today. I have so much I want to ask you about, but I always start my guests off getting to know what they’re like. As a kid, you had a grandfather who had a textile business which was big in Switzerland at the time.
One of your early entrepreneurial ventures was going out and getting paid to go flyer the neighborhood to tell people about the textile business, which that’s an interesting approach. I’m not sure that I would take a flyer off my car and be like, okay, I think I need some textile work, but, you know, maybe that’s what you do. Tell us about it.
Marc Stöckli: 02:54
Not not quite. It was at very young age, my first paid gig, maybe nine years old, maybe ten years old. It was kind of filling brochures into an envelope, closing them, put the stamps on it, put the address label on that were sent. Kind of. It was the first time and only time.
I think the company did some direct to consumer marketing. Okay. And that was it. That was my first small pay gig. I think it was about $1 a day.
So, so probably child labor at the time.
John Corcoran: 03:22
A dollar a day. Yeah. Well, hey, man, money’s money when you’re that age.
Marc Stöckli: 03:26
Exactly. And you.
John Corcoran: 03:27
You later.
Marc Stöckli: 03:28
Actually, it was one franc which, with the strengthening of the franc, it’s not even that bad. So.
John Corcoran: 03:33
Okay. And you later also did tennis instructions as well. You’re big into tennis.
Marc Stöckli: 03:39
Yes.
Marc Stöckli: 03:40
I was a fairly decent tennis player. And at school the school system was a bit different, but kind of college and university level. Besides playing tournaments, I also gave some tennis lessons, which was immensely well paid student at the time, especially the private lessons. But it was also quite in my first year at university. I also gave junior trainings, and one of the juniors was a pretty cute girl and I liked her.
And we started talking to each other and we had a drink together and and then she asked me about the studies and I said, well, it’s everything good. It’s going well, except there’s one class. It it’s really terrible. The professor is so boring. I said, oh, that’s my father.
So that was that was a bit of a.
John Corcoran: 04:24
That’s funny. Yeah. Yeah. Whoops. Exactly.
So you you have this long corporate career. You worked in the corporate world for different companies, and then you eventually this is an unusual trajectory. But then you start Toshima, which was a digital encryption business initially in 2000, which is pretty early stage to be thinking about something like that, encrypting our data. That’s something that really didn’t splash into the front pages until, I don’t know, the last 5 to 8 years. So what was it?
Why did you see that kind of opportunity? Or why did you decide to pursue that?
Marc Stöckli: 05:05
Yes. So. So right before there was another company where I was also a co-founder that failed. And that company had a much, much broader vision for founders, two senior guys, two junior guys. I was one of the junior and that started to run into trouble quite.
We had the dotcom crash in 2000 that it didn’t help either.
John Corcoran: 05:28
Lots of casualties at that time. What was the big vision?
Marc Stöckli: 05:31
In our case, it was really that the product vision was way too ambitious, wanting too many things for too many people. And also as a founder team, we pretty early split and it was kind of a two versus two. And that was actually that was actually the trigger for my interest in boards. Maybe we get back to that later on a very infamous day. Kind of.
My passion for board work got really started in that phase, but was then really the CTO, my my junior co-founder, and I wanted to continue. We had this idea of a much, much more narrow aspect, really secure email, standalone only. We had the technology in mind. Or he had. I had the vision that this will be a topic that confidentiality of emails is is so important, is completely underappreciated.
And we had a few engineers. So so we basically did the restart out of the ashes of that failed company. And that’s that’s the start of interesting.
John Corcoran: 06:24
All right. So a bunch of things I want to unpack there. So first of all, what was the big vision of that first company.
Marc Stöckli: 06:29
It was really it was.
Marc Stöckli: 06:31
Almost, you know, something that IBM at the time or Microsoft could have done.
Marc Stöckli: 06:35
It was like.
Marc Stöckli: 06:36
Document management, content management, all the distribution channels, all in one platform. It was brilliant, but completely impossible to to either sell or develop or anything.
John Corcoran: 06:47
Lots of companies in that era before the.com meltdown were similar where they had these big, ambitious visions, or people could kind of see the future, but the Marcet hadn’t caught up to it yet. I want to get to your idea behind Timo, but you said there was an infamous board day that inspired your passion for this. What was that?
Marc Stöckli: 07:08
Yes. So we had in that in that company, we had a pretty high profile board. I had recruited quite a star studded kind of Swiss industry and Tech and Professional services board, some very senior, well-known Swiss business people, and most of the time still, our board was not neither effective nor nor helpful, nor valuable, but the key board meeting where we managed to kind of save the company, the sense that we were able to orderly wind down the company and pay back all the money to the investor, which was important to me morally, there was no legal obligation. It’s equity Happened on 9/11.
John Corcoran: 07:53
On September 11th, 2011.
Marc Stöckli: 07:57
Exactly, exactly. So you had the crucial board meeting.
John Corcoran: 08:01
Now Europe is five or six hours ahead of New York.
Marc Stöckli: 08:05
It was about 3pm where we started watching TV. And it was still the board meeting. And we managed to basically almost coup style, overcome the two senior guys and decide on what is called a liquidation in Switzerland, which is an orderly wind down of operations with the ability, with everything that you still have on the balance sheet to, to pay back to, to investors and, you know, make, make, make whole. So we managed to do that. They really wanted to just spend everything and just let it go and kind of hit hit the wall, whatever at whatever speed and that. So there really for a while or for a long time, the board did not live up to its name.But that day they made a difference. And that really kind of triggered my interest. I said, okay, what does it take? What does it take for a board to consistently really be of value and not just be a mere necessity? Because that day our board showed up.
Before, I didn’t find it very helpful.
John Corcoran: 09:08
Interesting. So what you’re saying is that because of that experience, because you saw how a board could really guide you through a really challenging period on a challenging day and give you a path forward that that inspired you to help others to have boards that can really work for them.
Marc Stöckli: 09:29
Exactly. I later, for a while, I was, you know, I attended board meetings in my capacity as a, as a as a strategy consultant at times. But those were large corporates. And that just was a kind of a, you know, a content provider. But in later in entrepreneurial settings, I just started to really take a very keen interest. I have probably about 200 board meetings and every single one of them. I take notes, not just on the meeting, but also at the meta level of of the board room, the board dynamics kind of what’s what’s going well, what’s not going well, what’s happening, why do problems, you know, start why, why, how, how do problems get resolved. So I just for, for a long time and and more recently in the EO global board experience, kind of that observation of board practices accelerated and intensified. And that’s really the basis for me having spent a good part of of last year writing down everything I, I know.
John Corcoran: 10:29
And because you attend these meetings and you take these detailed notes and you’re so passionate about digital encryption, no doubt you take these notes in the most secure, encrypted way possible. Right? I’m joking a little bit because you posted this on LinkedIn. You posted that you you always do it with a pen and paper. That’s interesting to me.
Marc Stöckli: 10:50
Exactly right.
John Corcoran: 10:51
So you’re. And you’re passionate about that. You’re like, it has to be pen and paper.
Marc Stöckli: 10:54
My my wife is a very avid fountain pen collector. So I have the privilege of every few weeks, she replaces the pen on my desk and kind of furnishes it with something else from her collection. So I’ve started to reuse fountain pens. A few years back. And it’s it’s beautiful.
I have a I don’t have a nice handwriting, but it’s a little bit less ugly with fountain pens. And for me, the note taking is much more about internalizing my my, my knowledge and my thinking than about needing the notes to revisit them. Of course, sometimes I have to, but most most of the value is in really kind of accelerating my my thinking and my learning and my reflection. And for me, that happens better when I write kind of old fashioned style than when I type.
John Corcoran: 11:41
Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting. I, I, I have to take notes as well, but I do type, I type a lot faster. And for me it’s it’s kind of the same thing. I my chicken scratch is so bad and I write so slowly that I would just what ends up happening is the meetings moved on.
I’m still trying to write down something that happened four minutes ago, and in my head I’m thinking like, what was it they said? What was the third point? The fourth point that they made? You know, whereas if I type it, then at least I get it all down. You know, I can type pretty fast and so I can move on to the next thing.
But similar type of idea. Okay. So you let’s get back to the idea. So you narrow the vision. So you had this big vision the IBM the Google whatever.
And you decide let’s tackle just digital encryption.
Marc Stöckli: 12:27
Exactly. I mean, the core premise was, you know, email has been, you know, forecasted to be that next year for two decades, right? Yeah. You know, there’s there’s every email is dead. It’s, you know, it’s this.
John Corcoran: 12:40
It’s never.
Marc Stöckli: 12:41
Died. Well it hasn’t happened. Right. Yeah. So I you know, we were quite confident I was quite confident.
Email is here to stay. But it was quite known, at least in tech circles, that emails are really very unsafe in terms of protecting confidentiality. You know, if if people had a will to attack emails, they could pretty much read emails and always not because packets are kind of separated, not the whole thing typically, but parts. And if you have a, you know, if you have a domain that is of interest, if your domain is Goldman Sachs or, you know, whatever, then then you know, those are interesting things, right? So so that was that was the angle in Switzerland, we have a lot of industries that are quite discreet and privacy conscious banking, pharma, a lot of kind of very high R&D industries.
So so they.
John Corcoran: 13:32
Care they care about that.
Marc Stöckli: 13:34
Yeah, exactly. That was the core idea. Absolutely. Yes.
John Corcoran: 13:37
And you said that it was almost too early. I think you said.