The prestige of becoming a Non-Executive Director (NED) is losing its shine in iGaming. The dynamic is a concern for leadership advisor Leo Judkins, who believes the NED role should evolve to challenge CEOs, expose strategic blind spots and help executive teams navigate industry headwinds and adjustments.
Last month, I hosted a private event in London under Chatham House Rule. It uncovered something surprising about Non Executive Directors (NEDs) working in our sector.
Industry C-level figureheads like Richard Flint, Mark Blandford, Louise Nylen, Britt Boeskov and Andrew Bulloss ran a keynote, a fireside chat and a panel. Over 40 founders and CEOs in the audience. Almost all of them stayed for drinks at The Stratford to share what they took from the afternoon.
The same conclusion came up over and over again.
Being a NED isn’t as glamorous as people think. There are far more interesting, impactful and meaningful routes.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
As a NED, you face high scrutiny and real personal exposure. The pay isn’t great. And board dynamics are hard. Sometimes there’s even a CEO who sees you as a threat.
Plus the pace is slow, so you can’t execute on what you do best…That’s the reality of it.
And it’s why that crowd of 40 iGaming founders and CEOs walked away wanting something else. Both for their future next move, and for their current position right now.
For their future, the answer was the board advisor role, not the NED role. It’s meaningful. It challenges you. And it keeps you close to the work you’re good at, without the liability and slow pace of the boardroom.
It’s also the fastest route to a NED seat, if you still want one later. Advisor roles build the board-level track record that gets you there.
For their current position, the conversation kept coming back to one phrase: “a board of advisors”. Someone at your level. Senior enough to challenge you. Experienced enough to show you what you can’t see yourself. With the battle scars to stop you making the costly mistakes they made.
Because you run the business, you make the decisions that decide if the business even survives. But most founders and CEOs have no one to talk to about the things that keep them up at night.
Get those decisions wrong and you pay the highest price there is. Personally, and professionally.
I’ve seen this everywhere in the industry. With the 300+ founders and execs I’ve worked with, and the dozens of iGaming leaders I’ve interviewed on my podcast.
The pattern is always the same.
A leader carries the heaviest decision alone. It spins around their head, because there’s no one they can talk to.
They can’t tell their team, because they’d freak out. They can’t tell investors, because they need certainty. And they can’t tell family or friends, because they don’t get the industry.
So they carry it alone.
That isolation is where the real risk sits. Not in weak teams or board structures. In the total lack of structure around the person making the biggest decisions in the business.
No one exposes your blind spots. No one asks the question that challenges your thinking. So you make big decisions on incomplete information, because no one made you look at it differently.
That’s where an advisory role comes in.
A formal one, or a group of peers with the battle scars to prove it, who tell you the truth without an agenda. Not to give you answers. To ask the questions you haven’t thought about, or have been avoiding. That’s where the real value is.
Board conversations focus on structure. Who sits where. What oversight looks like. Which boxes get ticked. The leaders I talk to don’t need more structure. They need someone who will say the thing nobody else will.
So that’s the surprising truth from our event. Everyone arrived asking how to land their first NED. Most of them left asking a better question: who’s on my board right now?
Leo Judkins is the founder of The iGaming Leader, a private community for iGaming founders and CEOs who act as a personal board of advisors for each other.
After working with over 300 iGaming leaders across the industry, Leo now provides a highly vetted and confidential environment for iGaming execs to discuss the challenges and opportunities they cannot discuss anywhere else.
