Why Finance Teams Are Moving From Cloud to AI

In this episode, host Sasha Pilch sits down with John Glasgow, CEO and CFO of Campfire, to explore what it takes to build an AI-native ERP for modern finance teams.

John shares why the next major shift in accounting software is not from on-premise systems to the cloud, but from cloud tools to AI-native platforms. They discuss the reporting, consolidation, and planning challenges that still force finance teams into spreadsheets, along with Campfire’s approach to automating routine workflows while keeping governance and business context at the center.

The conversation also covers John’s path from investment banking and corporate finance at Adobe to building Campfire through Y Combinator, plus his view on how AI agents and connected data can change the role of the general ledger.

Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping the future of fintech.

This episode is sponsored by Granola. Try it free for 3 months at granola.ai/thisweekinfintech using code THISWEEKINFINTECH.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Sasha Pilch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-pilch

John Gasglow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnglasgow/

About This Month in Fintech

This Month in Fintech is our premiere showcase podcast.  Each month, Sasha Pilch will have a deep 1:1 conversation with the leaders in the fintech arena, exploring questions about the industries next moves, where to focus energies, and how to lead into the next chapters and paradigm shifting technologies change everything aga

Transcript

Intro

Sasha Pilch 0:00

When Mercury set out to build banking for ambitious companies, they needed card infrastructure that could keep up. 300,000 customers, 248 billion in transaction volume, and card programs spending debt, credit, consumer, and commercial. At that scale, fraud doesn't just cost money, it costs trust. That's where Lithic came in. 3DS-related fraud was driving a disproportionate share of Mercury's card fraud losses. A standard fix meant adding a third-party vendor into a real-time authorization flow, introducing more complexity and less control. Lithic built something different: an integrated 3DS solution that sits directly inside the authorization path. So authorization signals are available the moment the transaction hits. Mercury can update their fraud logic in real time, customize challenge flows, and route card holders through their own app to verify. The result? A 40% reduction in card fraud losses tied to 3DS transactions. That's what it looks like when infrastructure is as ambitious as the company it powers. Learn more at lithic.com/slashabout. Hello and welcome to the listeners of the This Month in FinTech podcast. My name is Sasha Pilge, and I'm so excited for our guest today. We're going to be interviewing John Glasgow, CEO and CFO of Campfire. Don't usually get both, so that's exciting. John, welcome to the podcast.

John Gasglow 1:35

Sasha, thank you so much for having me on today. Really excited to be here.

Sasha Pilch 1:38

And where are you dialing in from?

John Gasglow 1:40

This is San Francisco. I'm at uh Campfire's headquarters.

Sasha Pilch 1:43

Great. Um, San Francisco's back, I feel. I went recently and like it was such a buzz, and I it feels like it how it felt five years ago, I think.

John Gasglow 1:55

It's been fun. I mean, uh as of late, we have the World Cup, so I think that's been helpful. But yeah, AI, I mean, obviously, open AI, anthropic, a lot of the heavy hitters are here. Um, and so it's been fun to be uh building campfire uh in the heart of it. I'm from the Bay Area, so to me it's always been you know back. But uh you're absolutely right that uh post-COVID things are really humming. Uh and AI has just like every coffee shop, everywhere you go, every bus at every billboard, you know, the word uh the letters AI are just ubiquitous.

Sasha Pilch 2:27

Yeah, it's such an exciting time. Um great. So I've actually heard about Campfire for many years.

Meet Campfire’s CEO And CFO

Sasha Pilch 2:34

I remember when you came out of YC, I was on the investment team at um Fin Capital.

John Gasglow 2:40

Amazing.

Sasha Pilch 2:41

And we we didn't even get a chance to talk to you because you were so oversubscribed, which is a great problem to have. So congrats on that. So I'm really like looking forward to getting into the weeds on Campfire. But before I do, I'd love to have you tell the listeners a bit about your journey, like how you got to this point. Um, so you started your career as a financial analyst, and then two years later you co-founded your first company. So can you talk a little bit about that?

John Gasglow 3:11

Yeah. Um, during school, uh, actually I was just graduating and uh went and started uh a shopping startup. Shopping and e-com was super hot at the time. And it wasn't that unlike uh Pinterest is today. I have an identical twin brother, and he was actually my co-founder. So it was a lot of fun. We had some seed money and we went for it. Um ultimately didn't pan out, but I think it it uh it was a huge learning experience. And I think one of the big ones was like, what is my edge? Like, yes, I love shopping, but like what did I uniquely bring to the market? Um, and so I you know, call it 15 issues later. I did feel I had an edge in this category in ways that I did not at that time. But yeah, I went on to have graduated the finance degree, um, went on to work in everything from investment banking to public market investing, got the CFA designation, and then made my way over to the operating side um through through an acquisition actually uh by Adobe and uh went over in corporate finance at Adobe, and that was really when I cut my teeth. Um, and that was about uh almost 10 years ago now, um, and been on the operating side ever since. And that um I remember like when I was researching you, seeing that transition, like you were at like doing MA at Union Square

From Finance Career To Founder

John Gasglow 4:30

Advisors and Magento, which was then spun out of eBay and helped help on the spin out and kind of saw it all the way through from spin out to acquisition, eBay to eBay to Adobe.

Sasha Pilch 4:43

And when you did that um move to Adobe, that was your first partnerships role, or that came a bit later?

John Gasglow 4:52

Like you just uh this was this was purely finance. So I was on the what ended up largely being go to market finance is where they needed the most help. Officially, I was strategic finance. So I was largely free roaming across the organization. A lot of, you know, back then we were still printing things out, or and so kind of coming out of investment banking, you print a lot of investment banking. I would literally just print out a lot of our financial data at Adobe and just circle red on the page and just build a lot of my own finance projects. And so maybe I saw there was deep discounting in a certain region, a certain um sales manager, a partnership team. I spent six months restructuring our partnership finance all the way over to uh I ran Deal Desk and PriceBook for part of Adobe's Enterprise Cloud. And so that was a great experience. We're adding about a billion in ARR for our. We are the small business unit Adobe, adding a billion ARR. Um but I think it was really helpful to see what operating at scale looks like from the financial side, because it acts as so much data that now as you know, Campfire grows and we're starting to really dig into numbers, it's been incredibly valuable to have that experience as yes, I'm now CFO because I have a finance background. Um, but I think also like, you know, and I'm skipping ahead a little bit, so we'll come back to Adobe, but also, you know, we are customer number one of our product. And so for me as the founder to be power user, I think was was super important to me.

Sasha Pilch 6:21

Yeah, totally. Um and totally agree with like the big company experience being so valuable when you go to startups. I spent the first nine years of my career working for big 50,000 plus person banks, and then going into a 15-person startup was like that past experience was so valuable. Um so after Adobe, you go to invoice to go. So acquired a smaller company, yeah. Um, and that gets acquired by Bill.com, which you work at until you take the leap and go into YC in June 2023. So, can you talk us a little bit about like making that leap as a your second company?

John Gasglow 7:05

Yeah, I mean, it was um timing, Kayleigh probably could not have been worse. Uh was vesting a lot of acquisition stock, highly compensated to be there at bill.com. Um, I actually had just had my first daughter. My my wife and I, my first daughter was just born. I was on parental leave. Um, my wife actually was a part of like a large-scale layoff um right after our our daughter was born. And so it was, you know, lots of diapers. Uh, and we went from kind of public company compensation package of one, you know, I was only one employed at that moment, to essentially unemployed salary, a founder's salary is not not a lot when you got a mortgage and uh and a and a newborn and a family and mouse to feed. Um, but it was a high conviction moment. It really was like I truly believed in this problem. You know, I had already been at two accounting software companies, invoice to go was B2B invoicing. We went from accounts receivable, sold to bill.com, you know, large public company, billion in revenue at the time, accounts payable, was on both sides of the general ledger. And that that was my first real foray into partnerships. And um, the largest partners for us were the

Taking The Leap Into YC

John Gasglow 8:20

general ledgers. And so I spent a lot of time with the general ledger incumbents, and it came down to applying to White Combinator with like, hey, this is really a category with a lot of opportunity. I know it quite well as a customer and as a partner. Um, spent a lot of time, you know, up to the executive and even founder level for the incumbent ERPs. And um, White Combinator famously, I think 25,000 applicants. Uh I don't know how many get an interview, but it's only an eight-minute interview for me. And uh in the interview, they pepper you with questions. Not very sure how it went, um, you know, because I was uh I was at home, you know, just kind of uh with with the little one. Um, and they're like, you're in, it starts tomorrow. And so starts the next day. I already lived in a year-wide combinator in San Francisco, so most folks moved from around the world. Um, I was certainly one of the oldest people and one of the only non-engineers. So I really was an outlier. Uh they had bingo night, and I was the only one that they one of the bingo pieces was like find someone with a child. I think I was like child. Um, but it it does drive ruthless prioritization. You know, I think um I told my wife when I applied to YC and got in that, you know, I I really am gonna enjoy being a founder, and this is my hobby now. I'm giving up, you know, sports, I'm giving up a lot. It's it's really family and and it's campfire. And I love working on campfire, and I, you know, I love spending time with my family. So I think those two fill me up. Um, but it's not for everybody. I mean, it's it's certainly intense, and no amount of life experience, a 15-year finance journey, no amount of experience can prepare you for the founder journey. Uh, finding product market fit is really wandering in the wilderness. And so the summer of 2023, we knew what we wanted to build. You know, I applied to YC with Build a Modern ERP. There was no pivoting, but ultimately, like getting those early customers, convincing somebody to take the leap for mission critical software. There was a there was a lot there. Um, but I think to your point on the by the end of the batch, uh, to your point on uh being on the investing side, we had we had tremendous uh uh just folks who were incredibly excited about Campfire. And it was a lot of it was like the time is now for one of the largest categories in the world, ERP. And and so then it just came down to execution.

Sasha Pilch 10:49

Congrats, like hats off to you. That's so stressful, like leaving your role with a young baby and your wife's situation, but it really does show like the conviction that you had in building an AI native ERP, and it's become so successful. So congratulations. Um, I remember back when I was the 13th employee at Ramp in the beginning of 2020, we connected with the standard ERPs like QuickBooks and Zero for the small customers, Sage and Netsuite for the mid-market, and everything's changed now with AI native companies like Campfire. So can you talk to us like a little bit about that journey? Like when you were initially setting out and like some of the early customers that you got.

John Gasglow 11:44

Yeah, a lot of the so even though I came from finance, what's funny is like a lot of the a lot of people you know will say this is really cool, but like I'm not ready to move. So a lot of the early customers actually ended up being just cold outbound that I was doing. Um now I earned a lot of respect because I was one of them. You know, I was a fellow finance peer, and they're like, hey, he talks my language, he at least gets it. Yeah, you know, I think our our very first product was I built the three-statement model in Google Sheets, and we actually had another tab that was um like a sum if off of uh a BREX, like a BREX feed, and I think a Mercury feed, we're just flowing into a Google Sheet tab. And uh, you know, I built the sum if off that was flowing it into the three-statement. And given my pants background, you know, just I was a wizard in spreadsheets. This was before vibe coding, but we iframed it into a login, and people were able to go and kind of you know, log in and check on their data and fundraise, and we just kept adding and and and building and building. I think to your to your point on AI native, at the time, a lot of folks weren't ready for for AI. You know, just you know, Gen AI had just been about six months prior. It had taken off in engineering and early on sales, definitely not on finance and accounting yet. So a lot of the early folks

Early Campfire Builds And First Customers

John Gasglow 13:05

were just like, I hate my ERP or my accounting software. It doesn't do some simple things like ARR reporting, or you know, maybe we have multi-entity consolidation, but we can't figure out reporting. It's quite hard to use. And so, to your point on ramp, a lot of them were just saying, like, we just want the ramp for GL. And that was, and you know, the time ramp, to my knowledge, doesn't didn't really have AI. It was just we want an easy onboarding, a great interface, something that the team can figure out that's like, wow, this is modern. And so ramp for GL was probably the first year of Campfire.

Sasha Pilch 13:39

Amazing. Um and I've had Dia Jolly on this podcast before. So she is the chief product officer and chief technology officer at Xero, also has a dual role like you. Um, and I asked her about newer entrants like Campfire, and her response was that bigger companies have an advantage because they have such a huge customer base that sees billions of transactions and they can use all that data to inform their roadmap, which I, you know, think totally makes sense and is like kind of the standard response for a larger company. Um, but I'd love to hear like your thoughts on that. And do you think that Campfire is gonna take on more market share than the likes of Xero one day?

John Gasglow 14:26

Yeah, great question. We we see Xero as more of an SMB solution and we're mid-market and lower enterprise. So if we're ever competing directly with Zero, we're we're really in the wrong deal. I think that it's a phenomenal SMB solution, uh, similar to QuickBooks. But once you need multi-entity, like once you need lease accounting, you know, we we are in every country today. We have customers with 100 plus subsidiaries operating on Campfire with 100 million rows of data. Um, and so I think there's just different levels of requirements for folks in the mid-market and learner enterprise that maybe um Zero is not necessarily focused on. I think for roadmap, coming, you know, as a finance peer, the first two years was already baked. I knew exactly what to go build. So even if I was still the only customer for the first two years, I had no, no, no questions on what to do next. I mean, tech companies really were you know struggling with like revenue accounting, revenue reporting, board reporting. You know, you start to get into some non-gap metrics like contribution margin, once you're profitable, like adjusted EBITDA. Um, even putting departments in the rows of an income statement, a

Why Mid-Market ERPs Need AI

John Gasglow 15:40

lot of the you know, smaller accounting softwares can't let you pivot between like chart of accounts and departments, just a lot of simple stuff that I felt the pain of as a customer that I was like, we just gotta go ship because I would just love to have had this. Um, but then I think you know, after two years, like half our customers come from a very mature ERP. We've now replaced Oracle Cloud, SAP, Workday, Net Suite, age intact, and everything below that. So at this point, it's a little less of like, let's rebuild, you know, lease accounting and prepaids, and and it's actually more about whiteboarding of like what is the future of the role look like and in the AI era. And so like we're shipping a lot of uh agents, we're shipping like we're the only ERP with our own agent store, sorry, uh MCP store. And the MCP store, like everybody has an MCP now, but a store means we can, you since you mentioned Ramp, we can go directly into Ramp's MCP and you can say look for unapproved POs and draft an accrual on the first of every month automatically in Campfire. We don't even need to hit the sync. We don't need to wait for something to be approved. It can go into your CRM and say, look for pipeline and build a five-day, you know, one-month, six-month cash flow forecast with deals that don't even sync into the accounting records yet. So a lot of our customers are saying, you're AI native, you've rethought every process with AI first, but there's also we need to rethink how the role is done. Like, should humans actually be labeling data, doing accruals? I think probably not. They should be reviewing that work. And the incumbents were great for bringing people from on-prem to cloud, and we're really bringing people from cloud to AI. And so um, we shipped our own foundation model. You know, we really invested there. So we don't think about everyone's worried about token costs right now. You know, we don't think about that as much as others because a lot of the AI workloads are on our own model, so we don't have any tokens at all. Um, so there's a lot of ways we've been forced and and pushed ourselves to think differently, uh, just to make sure, you know, we're really the platform of choice for where AI is done. And uh, you know, we have yet to see that from the incumbents.

Sasha Pilch 17:58

And I love that by the way. It's like very future forward and makes total sense to not have these very intelligent finance professionals doing mundane tasks like when they should be having more time to do the things that require the thinking. Um switching gears a little bit to your fundraise. So you've raised over $100 million now. How do you decide whether a dollar should go towards hiring or product development or AI infrastructure or go unspent?

John Gasglow 18:33

Yeah. The blessing and curse of being the CEO, founder, and CFO is you know, I set the vision, but I also I control the budget. And so I think the good thing there is like there's full alignment on like I'm incredibly like I wrote a uh memo to the company, 2026 is the year of agents. And so budget and vision. So, you know, I will, I will vibe, you know, I vibe coded our first agent platform and sent it, you know, and and and went through it with our product engineering team and as a vision statement. That was me from uh you know, founder and CEO hat. And then I delivered budget and headcount, you know, as the CFO to go execute on that. Um, I think it can be good to separate the two because you know, two two brains is typically better than one. Um, and I think like uh friction, you know, can help, you know, make sure right decisions and rigor is being applied. But um, yeah, that that's that's something I think about a lot is like how do we not only have the right ideas, but also like execute on them. And so that's

Agents, MCP Store, And Context Advantage

John Gasglow 19:36

that's been a big focus for me. Next up today is our all hands, and we're gonna be, I think 80% of it is about our AI and our agents. And I think that's you know, we don't, yes, we love our GL, we've got phenomenal audit controls, yes, we've public companies, we've done a great job supporting them on you know compliance, but we really believe, and I really believe our future is around AI and agents, and and so that's really where I've where I've driven the company.

Sasha Pilch 20:03

Great. And building on that, so what metric do you obsess over that nobody outside the company sees?

John Gasglow 20:13

What percentage of AI work is done on platform versus off?

Sasha Pilch 20:18

And where is it currently at?

John Gasglow 20:20

Uh we're 95% on platform. So we have a great MCP, we've got great APIs that are open, and I tell our AI engineering team that's what you're competing with, which is a Claude, a ChatGPT, via API and MCP. And one of our customers is Replit. You know, Replit's amazing for going up there and and doing AI tasks on your own, just like Claude and OpenAI and Gemini. So we've got to be better than that, right? And so we own the context layer, we live within the governance layer. We can consume all of the, all of the, you know, all of your transaction data. We can read all the memos, who did what. Um we've got a we've got to call it a bit of a cheat code, but uh it's still up to us to win. And I think we end up letting the customers choose where AI work's done. And, you know, as I noted there, to date, they've said you guys have been doing a great job at it.

Sasha Pilch 21:11

Awesome. Great metric. Um and switching gears again a little now. So, you know, you were true finance professional for so many years in your career. And then when you made the jump to Invoice2go and you pivoted into BD and partnerships, like that was a a different skill set. And I love the fact that now at Campfire you have this conference in San Francisco. Like when I first saw that, I was like, what a great business development strategy. So was that something that was born out of your time when you were at invoiced2goandbill.com and like doing the partnerships and BD side? Or like can you tell us a little bit about that?

John Gasglow 21:52

Yeah, I mean, we didn't have conferences at Invoice2go and Bill. We did at Adobe because Adobe, we were further up market. So I think conferences. A little more enterprisey. People will try me, you know, for me and Spotify, I won't travel to a Spotify conference. But you know, when we are uh enterprise consumer of something, you're more likely to make a trip. But um I think for us, it was we raised our series A, and we were still only 12 people. And I told uh Katrina, who still runs marketing, where do we deploy the money for building brand awareness? We did not, we could not find an AI conference for corporate finance and accounting folks. So last year in October, we held our first, and this year is our second. It's twice the size. Um, we had people fly in from Europe last year and all over the world for the first one. We're expecting kind of global travel again. But it's we're to your point earlier, like we're not here to just replace everybody. I think we're here to shepherd whether they're a customer

Funding Choices And A Hidden KPI

John Gasglow 22:56

or not, helping folks take the transition into the AI era. And that's incredibly important to me as a finance peer, is helping them be more strategic. What we're seeing, like forward-deployed accounting, some are calling it accounting engineer, finance engineer, you know, systems forward. There's a lot of phrases for it. But how do you become the one that's like relevant in this next era? And it's like learning how to use AI, learning how to trust agents, learning how to get the most out of them, but you're still the one like delivering the work, you know, you're still the one. And so we're gonna have sessions of like, you know, someone from a regulatory, you know, public company regulatory body talk about agents in the public markets, you know, big four auditors talking about how they get comfortable with AI. And then, of course, practitioners, CFOs, accountants, the full spectrum of like, here's where we are on our AI journey, hands-on working sessions, everyone's gonna build stuff together. But um, it's important to me to just share a lot of content. The only reason we started doing this actually more recently is a lot of finance folks I'd share at dinner. Like, here, you know, I built some sales commission calculator, or here I built my own cash flow forecasting tool. And they're like, Can I just watch you build? And so I started just screen sharing, you know, people were coming to the office and watching me screen share. And then we started doing webinars, and we were getting like a thousand people per webinar, just like Twitch streaming. It was like they just wanted to watch me like vibe code an app. And there's been this like huge craving of like, how do I do that? Um, so now we're just trying to go from more of like a one-to-one and more of like an asynchronous format to just better, better, better share out how to get there.

Sasha Pilch 24:42

Oh, that's awesome. Like um really like a bit nerdy but sweet, like um with the fun.

John Gasglow 24:52

Yeah, they're people just like, can I just can you just screen share? And I just want to like see how you build something. Yeah, I love it. But I still remember someone two months ago was like, super simple stuff. They were like, it was transformative for me when you showed me like, do you just need to download Claude Desktop and go into cowork? And you showed me one prompt, and and they're like, in the last two months you showed me that. Here's like the eight apps I've built that are like really offloading a lot of work. And I was like, wow, I think that to me, that was like a you know, I didn't even think that was a transformative comment I made, but for some folks, I think people just don't know where to start.

Sasha Pilch 25:29

Totally. It's it's amazing how much value just providing one thing can be like in someone's life. So it's like excellent that you're able to enhance people's work life like that. So it's fantastic.

John Gasglow 25:43

And I'm I'm more open than most finance folks because like we're here to just share out. I think most finance people are not gonna share a lot on LinkedIn or like in a in a webinar, because obviously it's sensitive data. Um, for us, is you know, I'm like, let's we just gotta share it out because no

Conferences, Webinars, And Teaching Finance AI

John Gasglow 26:00

one else is. So we're quite public about you know things we do internally. Um, and folks, folks appreciate that.

Sasha Pilch 26:07

Totally. And it's coming back around. Like Campfire is a rocket ship, so um, it's a good strategy. Um, so we're actually almost at time. We only have five minutes left. So before I go into the final fun question, is there anything else about Campfire that you want to share to the listeners?

John Gasglow 26:23

I would just say um obviously check us out if you haven't yet campfire.ai. But um we would love to hear from you. We love product feedback. I love product feedback. Um I think the only other thing I'd probably add is um we're known for like software companies, and we've got a lot of great ones from Replit to Post hog as customers, but we're seeing a lot of nonprofits. We have cheese manufacturers, we have flight schools, uh, we have someone building airplanes on campfire. So I think you know, everyone's got an ERP in the world. So let's chat over to, you know, even um venture funds are on campfire now too, because they'll have multi-entity requirements. So I think, you know, don't don't don't think you might not be a fit, like maybe you are. We've come a long way, is my only shout out.

Sasha Pilch 27:13

Yeah, it's such a it's so great like having a horizontal solution with this massive TAM. Like when I was at Ramp, I obviously went out to like all my fintech network because I'd been selling plaid before that, and so got all of those customers onto ramp. But then after that, I was like, wow, the world's really my oyster. Like I can go to like whatever industry I want. I did like flooring and construction and all the makeup brands that I wanted to like just use myself, and so like it's really like a fun product to sell. So I'm like, um, yeah.

John Gasglow 27:49

And look, a lot of like we had a locksmith at the house the other day, and they they physically mailed us uh a handwritten uh invoice and we mailed back a check. That was the only way to pay them. So I think you show someone ramp, or you show someone, and they're like, wow, yeah, this is this is amazing. Um so those are some of the folks that are the most blown away, which is which has been really enjoyable for me.

Sasha Pilch 28:12

Awesome. Um great. Okay, so we've only got two minutes left. So I'll ask you the question that I ask all guests at the end, which is what are your favorite books? One personal, it can be fiction or nonfiction, and one professional.

John Gasglow 28:27

Um, one of uh I was able to get uh a group dinner with uh Ollie, the CEO of Databricks the other day, and he really recommended The Art of War by uh Sun Tzu. And so I've been doing that on tape. Um that's been really fun. Otherwise, I consume a lot of content to stay current. So, like the information, uh Wall Street Journal, really staying up to date is part of my role. And so those are some of the sources I I follow, in addition to some fun podcasts like this one.

Sasha Pilch 28:58

Great. Um, it's always like helpful hearing from exceptional people like you what you're consuming. Um, so our other listeners can follow what you do, and I'm gonna do the same. Um, so that's actually all we had time for. So thank you so much, John. It was great to have you on the podcast. Um, thanks to all the listeners. Please subscribe, write a review, and share the podcast with anyone that you would think is would find it valuable. And we'll be back next month with another episode.

John Gasglow 29:28

I just want to thank you so much, Sasha, for having me on. And

Closing

John Gasglow 29:30

thanks all for listening today. Hopefully, you found something valuable.