Peer support
Peer groups for iGaming leaders: what senior people have actually tried
I went back through 21 suitability calls from this year to see how senior people in this industry go looking for peers, and why it so rarely works. The answer isn't what I expected.
Leo Judkins, Founder, The iGaming Leader
Published 27 Jul 2026 · Rewritten 24 Sep 2026
Every prospective member of the Mastermind has a call with me before anything else. Part of it is me working out whether they’re at the right level. Part of it is them telling me what they’ve already tried. Between January and September this year that was 21 conversations with founders, CEOs and C-suite executives across operators, suppliers and studios.
Before I wrote this I assumed the story would be familiar: people had tried a peer group, found competitors in the room or vendors selling to them, and left. That is not what they said. Almost nobody described a peer group that failed. They described never having found one at all, and a series of substitutes that quietly didn’t do the job.
A note on sourcing. Quotes below are verbatim from recorded calls, with permission to use them anonymously. I’ve given roles, not names or companies.
What people had actually tried
Expos and conferences. The most common answer by a distance. iGaming runs on ICE, SiGMA, iGB and the rest, and everyone I spoke to had been going for years. Nobody thought of them as a source of peers.
You just talk to a thousand people, but you come out usually with very little. It tends to be quite shallow. Expos are not a good place for that.
Reaching out on LinkedIn. Several people had tried to build their own group by messaging other executives and arranging coffees. The same CEO: “It never became something more meaningful.” Without structure, one coffee stays one coffee.
Investors. Founders with minority investors had tried using them as a sounding board. It fails in a specific way: investors take information in, they don’t push on it. One described his as “very passive”. A strategy executive at a listed group put it more directly: “Investors are sort of just taking in the information. They’re not really pushing back.”
Consultants and advisory boards. Good ones exist, and people use them. But as one executive said, “they get pricey, so I’ve got to limit dialogue with them.” A peer you can only afford to speak to occasionally isn’t a peer. One CEO runs three formal advisory boards and rotates the members deliberately, “because there’s a risk it just becomes an echo chamber.”
A partner at home. Mentioned often, always with the same caveat. “I had my wife, but it’s not the same.” Or, from a member: “Who do you talk to about those decisions? My husband, who knows nothing about it.”
What almost nobody mentioned: the general-purpose executive networks like Vistage, YPO or EO. In 21 calls they came up close to never. I’d assumed they were the competition. In practice the people I speak to haven’t considered them, because none of them are built for this industry.
Why the people closest to you can’t help
The pattern under all of this is the same. The people with the authority to hear your real problem don’t have the context to be useful, and the people with the context don’t have the standing to be told.
A CCO of a regulated operator told me he has one colleague on his management team with industry experience. His own chief executive came from another sector and, in his words, “doesn’t know the industry.” He’s heading into a budget cycle with decisions on org structure, data suppliers and a fundamental shift in the revenue mix, and nobody in the building can stress-test them.
A strategy executive described the same problem from a different angle. His board is new to gaming. “If my IT team says it’s going to take four months and ten people, I couldn’t really tell you if that’s actually right.” There is no one senior enough, and independent enough, to give him a second opinion.
And the team is off limits for a different reason. As one member put it: “I try not to talk to my team about it, because I don’t like that to filter down.” The board marks your homework. The team needs you certain. So the decision stays in your head.
There are conversations I’d want to have with peers that I just don’t know where to go with.
The trigger is rarely a crisis
I expected people to arrive after something dramatic. A firing, a failed raise, a regulatory hit. Some do. But the more common story is quieter: a change that removes the peer contact they used to have without anyone noticing.
One executive had spent years in investor relations, where talking to other senior people was built into the job. His role shifted to strategy under new ownership and that channel disappeared. “I kind of feel in some ways a bit more isolated.”
A founder had just finished an eighteen-month platform rebuild. The firefighting was over, and for the first time the decisions in front of him were about scaling and dilution rather than survival. He had no one to take them to. “It’s been a lonely process, building a company and scaling it.”
The stakes go up at exactly the moment the support falls away. That’s the shape of it.
Even after all these years, I don’t feel like I have real relationships with people in the industry, except for a few exceptions.
What a peer group has to do
Given all that, the requirements are fairly clear, and they’re not the ones I’d have written before going through the calls.
- Industry context, by default. The single most repeated gap. Nobody wants to explain what a licence condition or a hold rate means before they can ask the question.
- People who push back. Investors, boards and consultants all listen. Almost none of them challenge. A peer group only earns its place if it does.
- Structure, so it doesn’t dissolve. Every self-organised attempt I heard about ended the same way: not badly, just quietly. A fixed cadence is the difference between a network and a group.
- Contractual confidentiality. This is a small industry. Everyone I spoke to knew that. If discretion isn’t in writing, nobody brings the real question.
- Accountability. One CEO said it as a realisation mid-call: “Nobody holds you accountable anymore.” Above a certain level, nobody checks whether you did the thing you said you would.
Where the Mastermind fits
The iGaming Leader Mastermind was built for the gap these calls describe: Inner Circles of five vetted peers at your level, all in iGaming, none of them competitors or vendors, one hour a week, every member under NDA. Whether it’s right for you is what the suitability call is for, and I say no when it isn’t.
If the option you’re actually weighing is a return to business school, should you do an MBA? covers that comparison. For what founders and CEOs say about the isolation itself, in their own words, read nobody tells you about the lonely part.