Anywhere.FM

Overview

Anywhere.FM was a cloud music locker service founded in San Francisco in 2007 by Sachin Rekhi, Anson Tsai, and Luxiou Chen—three engineers who built the product during Y Combinator's Summer 2007 batch.The service let users upload their existing iTunes, WinAmp, or Windows Media Player libraries and stream them from any browser, wrapping the experience in an iTunes-style web player with social profiles and a music discovery feature called Friend Radio.

The product was technically excellent—TechCrunch called it the best upload and player interface in the space—and achieved genuine early traction, accumulating somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 users and over 9 million uploaded songs within six months of launch.But the company raised under $100,000 in total, never resolved its monetization model, and was acqui-hired by imeem in January 2008 for an estimated $2–5 million.

The core thesis of failure is straightforward: Anywhere.FM optimized for launch velocity when the category required licensing infrastructure, label relationships, and a sustainable monetization architecture that took years—not months—to construct.

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Founding Story

Sachin Rekhi, Anson Tsai, and Luxiou Chen came together in 2007 with elite academic credentials and meaningful industry experience. Rekhi had studied at the University of Pennsylvania; Tsai and Chen both held degrees from MIT.^[1] Before founding Anywhere.FM, the team had worked at Xbox, Amazon, and Microsoft—backgrounds that gave them engineering depth but also a product sensibility shaped by large-platform thinking.^[2]

The founding story begins not with a great idea but with a great team. When the founders pitched their original concept to Y Combinator in the spring of 2007, Paul Graham rejected the idea outright. Rekhi recalled the exchange directly: "I hate your idea, but I really like your team. So, you guys are in YC only if you come up with a new startup idea."^[3] The original idea has never been documented publicly, which makes it impossible to assess how much the forced pivot shaped the company's ultimate direction. What is clear is that the team accepted the challenge, pivoted to the Anywhere.FM concept, and built a working product within the same summer.

Rekhi later described the YC experience as formative: "I did Y Combinator the Summer of 2007 in Boston with two awesome co-founders."^[4] The batch ran in Boston, and the team built Anywhere.FM from scratch during those months—a demonstration of strong execution velocity that would become both the company's greatest asset and, ultimately, a contributing factor in its failure.

The insight behind the product was simple and real: people had spent years building music libraries in iTunes, and those libraries were trapped on a single computer. If you were at work, at a friend's house, or traveling, your music wasn't with you. Cloud storage was nascent, streaming services were either nonexistent or legally murky, and the MP3 era had produced millions of users with large, carefully curated local libraries. Anywhere.FM's answer was to treat those libraries as personal property—which they legally were—and give users a browser-based player to access them from anywhere.