John
Glasgow

The CFO who built the ERP he always needed

In the summer of 2023, John Glasgow was on parental leave when an email arrived: Y Combinator had accepted his application to build Campfire. He closed his laptop, called his manager, and never went back to Bill.com. His oldest daughter and his company share a birthday.

That origin story captures something essential about Glasgow. He is, at his core, a finance operator who spent 15 years watching accounting teams drown in spreadsheet-patching, manual reconciliations, and ERP systems that required consultants just to reconfigure. Adobe. Fidelity. Union Square Advisors. Invoice2go. Bill.com. He sat in every role that touches the ledger - and accumulated a very specific list of grievances.

Campfire was built from that list. Not a layer on top of QuickBooks. Not another plug-in for NetSuite. A general ledger rebuilt from scratch, with AI baked in at the foundation rather than sprayed on top as a feature. Glasgow calls this the "systems-first" approach - and it's a phrase that carries the weight of someone who watched too many CFOs hit send on board decks and immediately wonder if the numbers were right.

Building the ERP that thinks like a CFO

Campfire launched with a pitch that landed somewhere between audacious and obvious: every fast-growing tech company eventually outgrows QuickBooks, and most of them land on NetSuite - a system originally built in 1998, before cloud computing was a phrase anyone used. Glasgow's argument is simple: these companies deserve something built for how finance actually works now.

Within nine months of founding, Glasgow had enterprise customers with over 100 employees ripping out NetSuite and migrating to Campfire. By the time the Series B closed in October 2025, the customer list included public companies, IPO-ready firms, and a portfolio of AI-native startups like Replit, Decagon, and PostHog - names that signal where the momentum in enterprise software is pointing.

The platform does what any ERP must: general ledger, revenue recognition, invoicing, reconciliations, financial close. But two products set it apart. First, Ember - an AI agent woven into the fabric of the platform, built to handle the unglamorous work that usually consumes entire accounting departments: journal entries, bank reconciliations, variance analysis, compliance checks. Second, the Large Accounting Model (LAM) - a proprietary AI trained exclusively on accounting data, achieving 95% accuracy on key financial workflows. Not a general-purpose model tuned on accounting docs. A model trained to think the way accountants think.

$100 million. Twelve weeks.

The speed of Campfire's fundraise became its own kind of signal. In June 2025, Accel led a $35 million Series A. Twelve weeks later, Accel and Ribbit Capital co-led a $65 million Series B, with continued investment from Foundation Capital and Y Combinator. Total raised: over $100 million before the company had finished its second year.

Glasgow's response to the question of how to spend $100 million was exactly what you'd expect from a CFO-turned-founder: "There are many ways to spend $100 million. The hard part is deciding how to spend it wisely." He put the capital toward AI capability expansion, deeper accounting modules, and hiring - careful, systems-minded deployment of a war chest that could have easily been wasted on noise.

The company has received acquisition approaches. Glasgow has declined them all. The stated direction is public markets - and specifically, Glasgow intends to run Campfire's own financial operations on the Campfire platform when they do. It's a founder-as-customer stance drawn from Parker Conrad's approach at Rippling, and it's the kind of conviction that makes investors comfortable with a dual CEO/CFO arrangement that would make most governance advisors uncomfortable.

In the office five days a week. In every customer's Slack channel too.

Glasgow has 140 employees and a two-year-old company with 10x revenue growth. He still comes into the San Francisco office every day of the week. He still sits in every new customer's Slack channel during onboarding - not because he doesn't trust his team, but because he wants to know personally when what was promised in the sales process doesn't match what gets delivered.

He calls himself "customer number zero." The platform that Campfire's customers run on is the same one Glasgow uses to manage Campfire's own finances. This is not a metaphor. It is a deliberate architecture decision: if the system breaks for Campfire internally, the CEO is the first to notice. Product stability isn't a roadmap priority. It's a daily lived condition for the person running the company.

The management style extends to how he handles advice. His closest advisor is his identical twin brother - also a startup founder. Glasgow's rule: find mentors who are just a few steps ahead of where you are, not icons from a different era of company-building. The distance between where you are and where they were is too great; the lessons don't translate. The twin is close enough to the present to give guidance that actually fits.

His wife, meanwhile, runs what he calls the "big boss at home" approval process. Major decisions pass through her before they're finalized. He describes her as his "silent cofounder." Glasgow makes sure to be home before his daughters go to bed, even as the company scales. The oldest is the same age as Campfire. She has never known a version of her father who wasn't building this company.

Fifteen years of watching finance teams suffer

Before Campfire, John Glasgow built his career at the intersection of corporate finance and business development - a combination that meant he both understood the problems and could see the commercial leverage points.

He started at Fidelity and Union Square Advisors, learning institutional finance from the inside. At Adobe, he rose to Director of Finance and Strategy - and when his manager left to run an Accel-backed startup called Invoice2go, he followed. At Invoice2go, Glasgow ran corporate development and partnerships as an executive reporting to the CEO. In fall 2021, Bill.com acquired Invoice2go for approximately $625 million. Glasgow moved to Bill.com as VP of Business Development and Partnerships, reporting to the CFO.

Invoice2go was the training ground for what came next. Building financial tools for small businesses, watching the acquisition process from the inside, absorbing how enterprise finance actually works at scale - it all compounded into a very specific founder thesis. The problem wasn't that accounting software was bad. The problem was that it had been built for a world that no longer existed, then left to accumulate technical debt while the companies running on it got faster and more complex.

ERP as a system of action, not a system of record

The framing Glasgow returns to is the shift from ERP as passive ledger to ERP as active operator. A system of record stores what happened. A system of action - Campfire's stated ambition - intervenes in what's happening. It catches the variance before the close. It reconciles the bank account before the analyst notices the discrepancy. It flags the compliance issue before the auditor does.

The goal for finance teams is fewer people doing more forward-thinking work. Not downsizing. Not automation for its own sake. Glasgow is explicit: "We want three accountants, and we want them doing more strategic work, but we need everything accurate." The AI does the transactional layer. The humans do the judgment layer. That division of labor is the product thesis in a sentence.

Glasgow's model for the future of his own role is specific and a little unusual: he has said he wants to still be running Campfire's instance when they go public - serving as both CEO and the customer most dependent on the product working. It's a constraint that keeps the product honest. It's also, unmistakably, a very CFO way to think about accountability.