Overview

Reble (later Reble.FM) was a peer-to-peer music streaming startup founded in 2006 by Nick Meyer, a former MIT student who had previously built viral consumer products at scale. The company joined Y Combinator's Summer 2007 batch as a two-person team based in San Francisco, and launched its public beta in February 2008. Its core product was a Windows-only desktop client that let users stream music directly from friends' local libraries in real time — not download it — using the Jabber open-source messaging protocol as its backbone.^[1]

Reble failed because its value proposition required simultaneous adoption by both sides of a social connection, on a platform (Windows desktop) that was already losing ground to browser-based alternatives, in a market where web-first competitors were eliminating the friction Reble was asking users to accept. The cold-start problem was structural, not solvable by better execution alone.

Approximately three years after founding — around 2009 — Reble.FM was acquired by Playlist.com, a web-based music service.^[2] No acquisition price or terms were disclosed. Meyer moved on quickly, co-founding MileWise in 2009, a travel metasearch engine that was acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 — a more successful second act that suggested the Reble experience sharpened rather than discouraged his entrepreneurial instincts.^[3]

Founding Story

Nick Meyer came to Reble with an unusual credential for a first-time startup founder: he had already built a product used by hundreds of thousands of people. While still in high school, Meyer co-founded Kings of Chaos, a massively multiplayer online game that attracted hundreds of thousands of daily players at its peak.^[4] That experience — building viral, socially networked consumer products before "social" was a product category — shaped the instincts he brought to Reble.

Meyer founded Reble in 2006 during his time at MIT.^[5] The founding insight was simple and experientially grounded: the music on your friends' hard drives is one of the best discovery surfaces available, and yet accessing it required either physically sitting at their computer or exchanging files through channels that were legally precarious. Meyer wanted to collapse that gap. As he put it at the time of Reble's public beta launch: "Playing music on my friend's computer should feel just like playing a song on my hard-drive, and you should be able to add any of your friends' music to playlists."^[6]

The legal architecture of the product was as deliberate as the social one. The file-sharing wars of the early 2000s — Napster's shutdown in 2001, the RIAA's litigation campaign against individual users — had made the music industry's posture toward P2P technology clear. Meyer's answer was to build a streaming product, not a downloading one. By transmitting audio in real time rather than transferring files, Reble argued it occupied a legal gray zone distinct from both traditional P2P file sharing and the internet radio royalty regime that burdened services like Pandora. The team engaged the music industry from the very beginning of the company's life, signaling awareness that legal clearance was a prerequisite, not an afterthought.^[7]

Reble joined Y Combinator's Summer 2007 batch as a two-person team.^[8] The identity of the second team member is not documented in any public record. YC's backing was described as partial in Meyer's later biographical materials, suggesting the company did not raise a significant external round beyond the YC investment.^[9] The company operated out of San Francisco throughout its life.

Timeline

• 2006 — Nick Meyer founds Reble while attending MIT, with the concept of legal P2P music streaming from friends' libraries.^[10]

• June 2007 — Reble joins Y Combinator's Summer 2007 batch as a two-person team; receives partial YC funding.^[11]