From North Sea to C-Suite
Nana Totoe doesn’t have the background of your average gaming executive. She spent the first eight years of her career as a chemical engineer with Baker Hughes, splitting her time between offshore oil rigs and onshore optimization. When she decided she wanted a change—and a move back to her native London—she cast widely, landing a project management role at Kambi. She left deep waters behind, and dove straight into new ones.
From Kambi she moved to GAN, where work in the U.S. market gave her a full-stack view of platform architecture, sportsbook operations and account management. A former colleague eventually brought her to Sportingtech, where she rose from head of technical account management to operations director to COO in just under three years.
Today, Totoe oversees account management, project delivery and product ownership across the organization, moving in any given day from strategic conversations with operators about roadmap priorities to hands-on delivery reviews with development teams, working to unblock whatever’s standing between the team and its goals.
That range suits her and reflects a work ethic she’s carried since the beginning. “I’m not very good at saying no,” says Totoe. “I’m always determined to deliver, no matter how long it takes.”
Early in her career, managing a healthy work-life balance was a challenge—one she navigated largely through sheer perseverance. She doesn’t frame it as a regret, but as the price of admission for someone who wanted to absorb everything as quickly as possible. “It’s definitely made me better at what I do.”
That curiosity, she says, has been the throughline across every role she’s held—one that made switching industries feel less like a risk than an exciting next destination. “Moving from oil and gas to iGaming was daunting, but I had that drive and passion to really want to understand how things work.”
She’s quick to credit longtime mentor Tom Ustunel for helping her channel that curiosity productively. “He’s been a quite strong supporter of mine in my development, being that sounding board for my ideas, whether they’re good or bad… It’s always good to have someone there who will say, ‘I think you might need to think about that one a little bit more.’”
It’s the kind of guidance she now tries to pay forward. Her advice to younger professionals is straightforward: Get comfortable being uncomfortable. “You need to put yourself out of your comfort zone. The broader your understanding of different areas of the business, the better the decisions you can make.”
Beyond projects in the pipeline, the opportunity she seems most energized by is closer to home. “I’ve got a really good team and some of them really want to grow,” she says. “At the end of the day, your rate of growth is in your own hands.”
As someone who turned a chemical engineering degree into a COO role in a completely new industry, Totoe knows better than most how to help others chart their own course.
