The Will to Succeed
Reflections on my conversation with Alexander Fernandez
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” ― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
I have been reading a lot lately. I cannot watch the news, it’s too depressing, so I pour myself into other worlds and other frames of thinking. This week it is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I do not know how this classic never made it onto my reading list before now, but here I am, trying to live a life of purpose through philosophy. Frankl’s insistence that we cannot always change our circumstances, only our response to them, feels like perfect timing as I think about my conversation with one of my oldest friends in games, Alexander Fernandez, CEO of Streamline Media.
Resilience often gets romanticized as grit for its own sake. Listening to Alexander this week, what I hear instead is something closer to Frankl’s “will to meaning.” He is not a hero who white-knuckles his way through suffering. He is a builder who keeps choosing to act because he believes his work matters. Meaning is not handed to him. He makes it, especially when things break.
When Alexander talks about the early days in Amsterdam, the details are stark. A handful of twenty-somethings in a cramped apartment, living off a thousand euros a month, cooking together, pooling time and talent to keep the lights on. Very quickly, he realized that if you do not have money, you still have time and energy, and those become your currency. That was not a romantic struggle. It was a young entrepreneur assessing his situation and deliberately investing his scarcest resources into a future he could not yet see.
Frankl writes about prisoners in the camps discovering that their last freedom was the ability to choose their attitude. Alexander’s version is less dramatic, but it runs on the same track. The bank laughed him out of the room and called games a hobby. Clients were uncertain. The industry was volatile. He could have treated that as the world’s verdict on his dream. Instead, he treated every setback as a data point. Over time, he learned the cycles of the economy and the games business, how credit floods in and then disappears. The world, to him, is not random. It is a system you can learn and navigate.
The 2008 financial crisis is where his story most clearly overlaps with Frankl’s sense of responsibility for unavoidable suffering. Streamline had signed millions in deals. On paper, they were ready to launch. Then Lehman Brothers collapsed, credit froze, and one client after another canceled or went under. He found himself with a studio in Amsterdam and a staff he could no longer honestly protect. In the Netherlands, if a company closed, employees could access a safety net through insurance. Owners, however, would absorb the damage. Alexander and his cofounders had to choose. Keep the studio open and risk dragging everyone down, or shut it and let their people be paid out while they take the hit.
He does not tell this story to cast himself as a martyr. He says simply that no one forced them to start the company. That line carries a lot of weight. It is Frankl’s freedom and responsibility translated into entrepreneurial terms. Alexander accepts that if he chooses to build this thing, then he must also choose how to end a chapter in a way that protects others, even when it is brutal for him. Debt, broken momentum, and questions about reputation all followed, but his measure of resilience is moral and analytical, not cosmetic. He did what he believed was right and then faced the consequences.
That same mindset shaped Streamline’s pivot to Kuala Lumpur. He did not retreat to a safer, more familiar market like the United States or the United Kingdom. He and his partner evaluated multiple cities through a clear set of criteria: cost, talent, language, policy, and long-term viability. Malaysia offered fluent English, raw but hungry talent, a supportive government, and the ability to sell in dollars and pay in local currency. He was not chasing cheapness. He was positioning the company to survive, grow, and create opportunities for a new generation of developers.
None of these decisions are clean. One of the choices he made to keep the company afloat was firing me. I was part of Streamline at one point, part of a cost structure that no longer made sense. Personally, ouch. Professionally, I could see the pattern I had already admired in him. He studied the system, saw what was required to keep the company alive, and accepted responsibility for doing it. Frankl reminds us that meaning often comes not from avoiding pain but from how we respond to it. Being let go became part of my own pattern recognition about this industry and about leadership.
Through it all, the will to meaning via work runs under every pivot he has made so far. Meaning for Alexander is not just releasing games. It is connecting the global south and the global north, giving young developers in emerging markets a first step into the industry, and building systems that let creative people focus on what they do best. He studies what is no longer possible, accepts those limits, and then turns early toward the next meaningful task. That is how he stays ahead, not by outrunning change, but by meeting it with clear eyes and a renewed decision to keep doing work that matters.
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