Stanislas Bocquet

CEO & Founder PALO IT

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Stanislas Bocquet founded PALO IT in Paris in September 2009 by selling his apartment and his car, and then spent eight months pitching before a single major client said yes. Fifteen years later the firm has more than 400 people of over fifty nationalities working from ten offices across nine countries on three continents — and it is still entirely independently owned and carries no debt, which for a consultancy of that size and geographic spread is genuinely unusual. The proposition has been consistent throughout: agile software development and innovation consulting delivered with an explicit social and environmental purpose, formalised through B Corporation certification and expressed in a stated count of 185-plus impact-driven projects. PALO IT now positions itself as an AI-first consultancy and has been named a New Champion by the World Economic Forum. Bocquet’s motivation for starting it was specific and personal: having watched the dot-com collapse fall hardest on older workers, he set out to build a company run on different terms, and he measures its success partly in whether that has held. “Now PALO IT is larger than me, larger than individuals,” he has said. “Everyone within the company owns a piece of our success.”

Career Highlights

• Founded PALO IT in Paris in September 2009, self-financed by selling his apartment and car; won the first major client after eight months of pitching.
• Grew the firm to 400+ experts of 50+ nationalities across ten offices in nine countries — Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, Bangkok, New York, Mexico City, Bogotá, Medellín, São Paulo and Paris.
• Kept the business 100% independently owned and debt-free through fifteen years of international expansion.
• Opened Singapore and Hong Kong in 2014, Mexico in 2016 and Bangkok in 2017, ahead of later expansion into Australia, Colombia, Brazil and the United States.
• Achieved “Happy at Work” workplace-culture certification in 2018 and B Corp certification in 2019, with B Corp certifications held in Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and Mexico.
• PALO IT recognised by the World Economic Forum as a New Champion.
• Delivered more than 185 impact-driven projects and implemented greenhouse-gas measurement across local offices.
• Repositioned the consultancy as AI-first.

Professional Journey

Bocquet’s career did not begin conventionally. He spent part of the late 1990s backpacking through South America, and found his direction on returning, at his first start-up. His first venture was a live-streaming company — a business roughly a decade ahead of the bandwidth that would have made it viable — which he sold in 2001. He then moved to the investor’s side of the table, managing start-ups for an investment fund focused on mobile internet, and separately ran willup.com, through which he advised on company formation and fundraising strategy. Earlier he had worked as a senior consultant at Trinova Hub, handling operational management, business-model repositioning, financial optimisation and team management.

The formative experience of that period was the dot-com collapse, and what struck him about it was not the lost valuations but who absorbed the damage. Older employees were the ones discarded. It left him with a conviction that a technology company could be organised on more durable terms, and that conviction is what the culture of PALO IT was eventually built to express.

In May 2002 he joined Valtech as sales director, responsible for new business development, partnership policy, sales and marketing strategy and the coordination of sales and delivery teams. He has described reading about Valtech’s founder that year as a moment of clarity — recognising, in someone else’s company, the business culture he had been imagining. He spent the rest of the decade there, learning the consulting business from the commercial side.

PALO IT was founded in September 2009. The financing was entirely his own: he sold his apartment and his car to fund it. Then came eight months of pitching without a major client, which is the part of a founding story that usually gets compressed to nothing and which in this case determined everything, because it meant the company had no runway to waste on the wrong first customer. The first big client arrived, and growth followed quickly.

The expansion was deliberately away from home. Singapore and Hong Kong opened in 2014, Mexico in 2016, Bangkok in 2017, with Australia, Colombia, Brazil and the United States following — so that a French consultancy ended up with the larger part of its footprint in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, and a workforce spanning more than fifty nationalities. Throughout, Bocquet declined outside capital. The firm remains 100% independently owned and debt-free, which constrained how fast it could grow and preserved his ability to keep the culture on the terms he had set.

Those terms were formalised in the late 2010s. PALO IT took “Happy at Work” certification in 2018 and became a B Corporation in 2019, with certifications held by its Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and Mexico entities — committing the business to audited social and environmental standards rather than to a statement of values. The company frames its work as helping organisations embrace technology as a force for good, and reports more than 185 impact-driven projects delivered, alongside greenhouse-gas measurement implemented across its local offices. The World Economic Forum has named it a New Champion.

The most recent shift is to an AI-first positioning: applying the same agile delivery and innovation-consulting model to AI-era problems, with the impact framing carried over rather than dropped. Bocquet continues to lead the firm as CEO and founder and speaks regularly on the circuit, including at French Chamber of Commerce events in Hong Kong.

Education

HEC Paris

Executive MBA

Babson College

Executive Program in Innovative Management and Entrepreneurial Leadership

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Master’s, Sales Strategy and International Negotiation

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Master’s, Management & Finance

French Navy (Marine nationale)

Executive Program in Leadership, Management & International Relations