John Glasgow

Sources#

The ERP for the AI Revolution is here

Summary#

CEO and founder of Campfire (YC S23), the AI-native ERP. Came to the category from 10+ years in corporate finance, then a stint as an exec (not founder) at a B2B invoicing-software company that sold for $600M — an exit that taught him the category wasn't big enough. He chose ERP deliberately because it's a massive market with a decades-old incumbent (NetSuite). His operating philosophy is unusually old-school for an AI-native founder: founder-market-fit, founder-led sales, stay close to the customer.

Founder–market fit as the "why now" answer#

Investors at demo day kept asking "why now? this is mission-critical, established software." Glasgow's credibility came from having lived inside the legacy systems: a decade in corporate finance, then — after his company was acquired — running partnerships where the largest partners were the legacy ERPs. Customers and partners kept telling him "we all have the same pain you did." That conviction is what let him "leave the corporate world behind." His category bet is explicitly long-horizon: "this is the last job I'll ever have… the next 30 years of my career will be Campfire," and he chose long-time-horizon investors to match.

Stances#

Founder-led sales, even in the AI era. He got Campfire to ~$1M ARR as the sole AE doing every demo and sale; he resists offloading sales to a hired AE or to an agent until after PMF. "Be as close to the customer as possible… I'm in every Slack channel with every customer." This is the seed of Founder-Led Sales Discipline and an explicit counterpoint to Founder as Agent Orchestrator.
Velocity as the promise to customers. "Our commitment is we're shipping every day" — the basis of Product Velocity as Moat.
Narrow focus beats feature-completeness. The disruption thesis of Narrow Wedge into a Legacy Market; "be the best for a very specific profile."
Build something people want / get paying customers fast. The YC mantra — still has the shirt; the first paying version was a Google Sheet iframed into a login within a month.

The hardest moment#

Spring 2024, ~9 months in: batch peers had either "taken off" or were still pivoting, and Campfire "was neither." The crisis was whether to micro-pivot or chase a specific industry. He kept going on conviction; it took ~6 more months (to Q4 2024) before NetSuite-to-Campfire migrations and referenceable real-business customers (won via cold outbound) made it inflect. His advice to his earlier self: "enjoy the journey… the bags get heavier" as the company scales (it's more stressful at 100+ employees than at seed).

Connections#

Campfire — founded and leads
Founder-Led Sales Discipline — his signature stance; the tension with orchestration
Founder as Agent Orchestrator — explicitly disagrees re: offloading sales (to AE or agent) pre-PMF
Narrow Wedge into a Legacy Market — his disruption strategy
Product Velocity as Moat — his customer commitment
Dogfooding as Product Discipline — "in every Slack channel" is dogfooding the customer relationship
Problem-Solution Fit Discipline — founder-market-fit + a decade of lived pain as the antidote to premature building
AI-Native Startup Lifecycle — a lived instance of the lean-AI-native founder arc

Sources#

The ERP for the AI Revolution is here