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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I’ve read books on both Trump and Tucker Carlson over the last few months, just to try to understand the MAGA mind a little more, and although it’s clear that Tucker has always despised Trump, I still never expected to hear him say what he said in the last 24 hours. And only a year into the current term.

Everywhere I look, Trump’s staunchest allies are turning on him. And he’s totally lost the manosphere, from Rogan to Trump, to Schultz and the rest. I have a lot of conservative mates, and a lot of liberal mates, and have no issues with either side: having said that, I have always seen supporting Trump as an intellectual skill issue.

It will be really interesting to see what happens over the next two and a half years. Will he regain some support, or will it continue to trend lower? I made a bet with a mate before he came to office that he’d get impeached, shot, or go full authoritarian and run for a third term. I’d say all three are on the cards, with authoritarian the least likely due to his lack of popularity. Anyway, enjoy today’s interview!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

John Glasgow, CEO & CFO at Campfire

John Glasgow is the founder, CEO, and CFO of Campfire, the AI-native ERP platform built for high-growth tech companies. Before founding Campfire, John spent over a decade in finance, holding senior roles at companies including Adobe, Invoice2go, and Bill.com, where he served as VP of Business Development and Partnerships after Invoice2go was acquired by Bill.com for over $625 million. It was during that acquisition process that the founding idea for Campfire was born: forced to manage hundreds of diligence requests in Excel because their ERP simply wasn't up to the task, John felt the pain of legacy accounting software firsthand. He went on to apply to Y Combinator in 2023, and learned he'd been accepted while on parental leave, and never went back.

Since launching Campfire in June 2023, John has built one of the fastest-moving companies in the ERP space. Within nine months of formation, Campfire had customers with over 100 employees replacing NetSuite with Campfire. The company raised $100 million in under a year and has drawn interest from public companies, AI startups, and finance teams preparing for IPOs. In this interview, John opens up about the zero-to-one journey, what it really takes to find product-market fit, and how he thinks about building culture, hiring, and leadership at a company that is growing as fast as the category it's disrupting.

What’s the problem you're trying to solve with Campfire? And why this?

Campfire is an AI-native ERP for high-growth businesses, typically tech companies. The real problem we're solving is that accounting software is very outdated, and a lot of people are asking: how do I automate more of the work, and how do I find deeper financial insights into my business so I can operate differently? Those two key pillars are what we really focused on, and we use a lot of AI to deliver a modern ERP that addresses both.

We actually had large Sydney operations, so I was very familiar with the Australian dollar and the multi-currency complexity that came with our US operations. Australia was core to our founding story.

What was the most difficult when going from zero to one?

The most difficult thing was that, while I felt a very strong conviction about the idea because I knew the category quite well, there was a lot of work to do to actually find product-market fit. It took more than a year of just pushing and pushing. During Y Combinator, a lot of my peers were taking off, the program ended, and I was still grinding through this very large build-out. I think the hardest part was really maintaining conviction. A lot of founders reach out to me and say, ‘I've been building and building, I believe strongly in what I'm doing, but I haven't found product-market fit. Maybe it's been six months, maybe it's been six years. How do I know when to keep going?’

Ultimately, we found our spot and the business really took off, but as all founders know, it's very hard to get through that first phase and find product-market fit. And even once you've found it, maintaining product-market fit is equally important.

What’s the refinement process and the go-to-market in this iteration stage?

There are many ways to go about it. My advice when founders reach out is that if it's a product that should ultimately be paid for, I feel strongly that you should charge people from the beginning. That's how you know you're solving real value for somebody and that there's something they actually want. That said, we started out with a design partner program before we were ready to charge. These were people who were passionate about the problem and were the end customers. We had ten people say they wanted in. They were excited about solving this problem because they'd experienced it themselves. I gave them some swag and said, "What if we met weekly or every other week, and you gave me feedback as I built the product so we could work through everything together?"

Those folks stayed with us through the build, and before the product was actually ready, I started telling them, "We're going to go live in the next month or two, and we actually want you to start paying now, put some money in upfront. The contract might not kick in until the product is usable in a month or two, but we're pushing hard on getting that commitment." Getting people who are ready to help you build was the core of the approach I took. There are many different approaches and there's no wrong answer, but that's what worked for me.

Tell us about your design partners?

We founded the company in June and launched the design partner program in July, so it was actually quite quick. I made it time-bound (a two-month program) and was clear about the perks: special pricing, some swag, and a few other benefits. One thing that was actually unique to the program was that, since we had a little seed funding, I thought it was important to get all ten design partners in a room together. I booked out a small conference room at a hotel and said, "Why don't all ten of you come on-site and we spend a full day working through a prototype together?"

That gave us a lot of very deep, concentrated feedback. You can absolutely do this virtually; you don't need to have everyone in a room, but getting them all together to bounce ideas off each other once the product is at a usable level can be really helpful. From design partner kickoff to paying customers, I started seeing them pay around August, and by the end of August, I started onboarding everyone.

How are you differentiating yourself from other tools?

Having been a former customer of the incumbents, I really understood the pain. So during outreach and when talking to prospects, there was a lot of, ‘Here are the pains you're experiencing. I know them because I lived them.’ Really understanding what those pains are was the foundation.

There are a lot of them. First, the systems were built in the nineties: the interface, the usability, and the ability to customize were all incredibly painful. On top of that, the time-to-value was six to nine months. Everyone we spoke to said they just don't have time for that. So the question became: how do we rethink the onboarding process and deliver a much better experience? The answer was what I would call ‘a consumer-grade front end’, where the end user can configure the product on their own and use it without a steep learning curve.

To use an Australian example, there’s Canva. What Canva has done for creativity is remarkable. I'm the most non-creative person in the world, and I can go into Canva and do amazing things. The difference in usability between Canva and something like Photoshop is material. We've really taken that same approach: let's build something where all users can actually use all of the product, as opposed to the classic problem where you log in, and you're only using 5% of it because the other 95% is too hard to figure out. That consumer-grade usability and onboarding experience has been our core differentiator from the start.

What was your experience at YC like?

The right mindset going into Y Combinator is understanding that they are not going to build a company for you or find customers for you. Your investors, often, aren't going to do that either. As a founder, everything is on you. YC is going to give you coaching, meet with you, give you feedback, and help you think differently, but ultimately it's really up to you.

Just don't go in thinking it's a classroom where they're going to show you how to build a company. That's still on you.

With that said, having them bring in people like Brian, the founder of Airbnb, Enrique, the founder of Brex, and Rajul from Zip (a well-known company in our category) was transformative for me as a founder. Hearing their founding stories, asking them tough questions in a very candid environment, and just being around alumni who were further along the journey than you were were incredibly valuable and something I'll always take with me.

What is a typical day as CEO and CFO?

There aren't many finance leaders who go on to found a company. We are, of course, the first customer of Campfire for our own accounting and financial reporting, and I've maintained the CFO title because I personally run our Campfire environment. When we're fundraising and diligence questions come up, I go into Campfire to make sure the product is usable for companies like ours. If it isn't, I go to the product team and say, ‘Here's what we need to add.’

As for the day-to-day, my role has evolved rapidly. When we started the company in June of 2023, I was literally doing everything short of writing the code: press releases, incorporation, sales, customer success, all of it. But as a founder, every time you make a hire, you essentially fire yourself from that role, and your responsibilities evolve. We hired a marketer, an implementation person, a BDR, and so on. We now have about 100 employees, and someone is doing every function at the company.

So my job is no longer to do everything. I spend most of my time on two things: hiring and thinking about product strategy. Even as a non-technical founder, I'm able to go into Claude and do amazing prototypes, and I spend a lot of time on nights and weekends prototyping future features for Campfire and delivering a well-defined vision to the product and engineering team in ways that, candidly, I wasn't even able to do when we first started. In an interesting way, AI has actually made me more involved in the engineering side than I used to be. But broadly, it's hiring, it's thinking about what's next, and it's making decisions like when to open a new office and who should be there.

What does your team look like?

I currently have more direct reports than I should, largely because I'm also leading sales right now—we're actively hiring a sales leader. To be clear, I have added one or two layers of management within the sales team over the last month, but I'm still the head of sales, so I have more reports there than is ideal and we're working to fix that.

What are some tangible ways that you try to perform as a leader?

One thing that felt unique to us is that, at just five employees, we did an offsite where everybody wrote on one wall with sticky notes everything they wanted Campfire to be, and on another wall everything they didn't want Campfire to be. I then found themes across all of them, used some AI to help identify those themes, and we rolled out a mission and core values for Campfire at employee number five.

I've spent a lot of time since then instilling those core values and that culture into everything we do, whether it's hiring or day-to-day life at the company. A lot of candidates who end up accepting an offer to come to Campfire literally say it was because of the culture. There are a lot of great AI companies in San Francisco and New York, so building and maintaining that culture is one of my biggest missions. We are in the office five days a week, and I make a point of going around to each team and working alongside them.

Whether it's ‘quality with velocity’ or ‘transparent accountability,’ as we grow, instilling those core values across the entire company—along with hiring—is probably my two biggest jobs.

How do you get the culture across in the hiring process?

Core values are part of every interview I conduct. I ask candidates questions about a time when a specific situation occurred, or how they handled a certain gray area. I'll even pull up our core values during the interview and ask them which one resonates most with them and why.

And then of course, when we back-channel references, we're asking whether this person operates with quality and velocity, whether they operate with transparent accountability; so the core values are woven into our referencing process as well, not just the interview itself. As I mentioned, I personally cover this part of every interview for every candidate to make sure they meet our bar. It's that important to us.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I have two young daughters, and personally, making sure I get to spend time with my family is everything. I try to see my kids every single night before they go to bed. That's what really energizes me for the next day, knowing that I get to bring my whole self into the office because I've had that time with my wife, my daughters, and our dog.

Professionally, there's a lot of founder burnout out there. Y Combinator has said that the number one reason startups shut down is not running out of money, it's founder burnout and co-founder breakups. It's not that a competitor runs you over or that the money simply runs out. So I spend a lot of time reminding myself that this is a marathon, not a sprint. I can't sprint the entire way. I think a lot about how to keep myself in it for the long run, because founder burnout is real.

As a founder, work is kind of omnipresent, so making sure I carve out those moments, whether it's in the car or in the kitchen, for even just micro-recharging, is something I prioritize. I'll be honest, it's still something I struggle with, so if you've got any advice, I'm all ears.

Extra reading / learning

• Tiny AI ERP startup Campfire is winning so many startups from NetSuite- June, 2025

• How Campfire Raised $100M+ While Doubling Revenue for 6 Quarters - February, 2026

• What an AI-native ERP general ledger means for FP&A - February, 2026

• Why the world needs a modern ERP and what makes it different - March, 2026

And that’s it! You can follow John on LinkedIn or check out Campfire on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting BILL—Your AI-powered financial operations platform.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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