A letter from Juan
Hi, I'm Juan.
When I was growing up, my father sent me a shortwave radio from the United States. I loved that radio. At night I'd turn the dial slowly and suddenly hear the BBC, or a station from France, voices and music from places I had never been. That little box made the world feel close.
I have always loved traveling and learning languages, and I've been studying them for as long as I can remember. Not long ago I wanted a radio like that again, to practice my languages by listening to real people talk and sing. Good shortwave radios are expensive now. Then I found that thousands of stations around the world stream online, and I thought: let's build it. One place to tune in to any country, to practice its language, and to arrive a little more ready to understand the people when I travel there.
There's another reason, too. My wife and I are immigrants. We have made a home far from home, and at certain times of the year, like Christmas, we want to feel closer to the home we left. Listening to the radio stations we grew up with does that for us. I built this for her as well, so she can turn those stations on wherever we are and feel a little closer to home.
So my vision is that FM is a learning tool, but I hope it's more than that. I hope it makes some people happy. I hope it helps someone feel close to home, or connect with a culture that isn't their own. I hope it makes someone want to travel, learn a new language, and open their mind a bit more.
I'm one of the two founders behind 2xAI Lab. We build AI experiences and explore what we can create with these new tools, and we build things for the fun of it. FM went from an idea to something real very fast, built together with an AI agent. Let's see where it goes from here.
Thank you for listening.