Pega CEO Alan Trefler: What Chess Taught Me About Running a Company

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Alan Trefler, founder and CEO of Pegasystems, to discuss what it takes to build and lead a company for over four decades. Trefler explains how a frustrating experience consulting for New York banks sparked the vision behind Pega, and why bootstrapping the company from scratch gave him a perspective on business that still shapes how he leads today. He breaks down how chess thinking, specifically the concept of candidate moves, applies directly to business strategy, why he thinks the current conversation around AI is mostly gibberish, and what it really means to build software that lasts. He also opens up about public market pressures, the billionaire label, and why significance matters more than success.