Insights
What we learned running a NED event for 40 iGaming leaders
Board-seat pathways in iGaming operate like a black box. We tried to open it up.
Leo Judkins, Founder, The iGaming LeaderHalf the senior leaders I speak to in iGaming want a board seat one day. Most of them don't know how to actually get one.
That's not because they're not qualified. A lot of them would be brilliant at it.
The problem is the whole thing operates like a black box. There's no job posting. No application form. No clear path. You just sort of hope someone taps you on the shoulder one day.
The people who've landed their first NED role rarely explain how they did it. So everyone else guesses, waits, and assumes it'll sort itself out eventually.
That's the gap we tried to address with a private event in London, limited to 40 people, specifically on how to land a first non-executive directorship in iGaming.
What the day covered
- A keynote Q&A with Richard Flint, former CEO of Sky Betting & Gaming, who grew the company from around 100 people to over 1,700 before it sold for £3.4bn — then went on to non-exec and chair roles at Flutter, LADbible, Butternut Box and Seat Unique.
- A fireside chat with Andrew Bulloss, who places NEDs for a living, on what organisations actually look for in a NED candidate: the realities of board search, the patterns that win seats, and the patterns that don't.
- A panel of three industry veterans who each walked through the exact steps they took to land their first board seat — the mistakes, the surprises, the conversations that actually got them on the board.
- And an open room, deliberately unstructured, for the conversations that don't happen at conferences.
Why it mattered
The real value wasn't any single session. It was giving forty senior people permission to ask the question they don't usually say out loud: who's actually helping me get there?
Sessions like this run periodically for the iGaming Leader community — rooms built around exactly this kind of senior-level, non-transactional conversation. Membership gives you access to more of them, along with the weekly Inner Circle sessions that make up the core of the mastermind.