The ERP for the AI Revolution is here

1. ATAndrew Tan0:00

   [upbeat music] I'm joined today by John Glasgow, CEO and founder of Campfire. Uh, Campfire recently raised their Series B, led by Accel and Ribbit. John, tell me about Campfire.

2. JGJohn Glasgow0:17

   Well first, Andrew, thanks for having me on today. Campfire is the AI-native ERP for high-growth companies, and we help finance and accounting teams automate manual work for their accounting and their financial reportings, whether it's taxes or investors. Um, and when we automate it, of course, uh, a lot of it's with AI, then we're able to allow them to focus on more strategic work.

3. ATAndrew Tan0:39

   So I guess tell us first, ERP, I, I don't know if everyone's familiar with that. What is that?

4. JGJohn Glasgow0:44

   Yeah. Enterprise resource planning, essentially all of the accounting and financial reporting for a company. So the good thing for us is literally everybody has taxes. They have... P- particularly in, in tech, a lot of folks have financial reporting requirements to investors. And so the market's wide because everybody essentially has one. Now it's just a matter of which one are you on. And so for us, it was not in education. We just had to go out and build something that people wanted.

5. ATAndrew Tan1:09

   Yeah. I mean, this is to me the, the classic established market, but then the question is how do you break in? I mean, I mean, you're going up against NetSuite. Like, how, how did you decide to do that?

6. JGJohn Glasgow1:21

   Yeah. And I vividly remember during my YC interview, uh, of course famously it was eight minutes, it went short.

7. ATAndrew Tan1:28

   [laughs]

8. JGJohn Glasgow1:28

   And, um, I was saying I wanna build a modern ERP. And they, uh... It was, it was Dalton, and Dalton was like, um, "Literally we've yet to see somebody that's excited about this category because it's so old and ancient and ready for something new," but also credible because I was in corporate finance for over 10 years. And so, um, yeah, it's a category I've gotten to know well in my career. But to your point, I think it was, it was definitely ripe for disruption.

9. ATAndrew Tan1:54

   Let's talk about that. That's the, that's the, um, you know, founder market fit piece there. How did you... W- what about your prior experiences led you to the space of ERPs and, and coming to the belief that now is the time to, uh, to do a new one?

10. JGJohn Glasgow2:08

    Yeah. And, and actually, like, meeting after we got into YC, that was the biggest question investors had, which was like, "Why now?"

11. ATAndrew Tan2:15

    Mm-hmm.

12. JGJohn Glasgow2:15

    And so I, I think a lot of it did come down to, uh, about a 10-year corporate finance career and really spending a lot of time in the legacy systems. And then, uh, our company got acquired, so I was no longer doing finance, I was doing partnerships. Our largest partners were the legacy ERPs-

13. ATAndrew Tan2:31

    Mm-hmm

14. JGJohn Glasgow2:31

    ... at the company that bought us. So we spent a lot of time with the customers as a partner, and initially it was like, well, maybe I'm the only person that thinks this is a, an opportunity. And then partnering with them, all of our customers were saying like, "Hey, actually this is a huge opportunity. All of us have the same pain you did." That it gave me the conviction to, to come to you guys and say, you know, "I'm gonna leave it all behind in the corporate world-

15. ATAndrew Tan2:52

    [laughs]

16. JGJohn Glasgow2:53

    ... and build something new."

17. ATAndrew Tan2:54

    Mm-hmm.

18. JGJohn Glasgow2:54

    But, and investors were very much g- at demo day, I vividly remember very much like, "Why now? This is like a very established market, mission-critical software for the customers. Um, and so how do you... Like, what's the catalyst?" And so I spent a lot of time on, on, on that mentally before I went and made the leap.

19. ATAndrew Tan3:14

    What, what were some of the, what were some of the things that you, you decided, like how, how you were gonna, you know, sometimes we say wedge into the space?

20. JGJohn Glasgow3:22

    Sure.

21. ATAndrew Tan3:23

    Yeah.

22. JGJohn Glasgow3:24

    Yeah. It, it's a great question because as you know in YC you've got a couple months to build-

23. ATAndrew Tan3:28

    Yeah

24. JGJohn Glasgow3:28

    ... you know, a working prototype and show revenue and success. And there were some other folks that had been in, uh, trying to tackle this problem that did very long stealth periods.

25. ATAndrew Tan3:37

    Mm-hmm.

26. JGJohn Glasgow3:37

    But, uh, you know, YC was very much like, "You got three months to ship something, get revenue, get paying customers."

27. ATAndrew Tan3:43

    Yes.

28. JGJohn Glasgow3:44

    So we very quickly... Actually, um, some other YC companies from prior batches saw this as a pain that we had reached out to. And given my finance background, just built, uh, the full version of, uh, the verse, first version in Google Sheets. And we put it into, uh, a login and had Brax and Mercury feeds-

29. ATAndrew Tan4:04

    Okay

30. JGJohn Glasgow4:04

    ... kinda in one tab. And then I just did a bunch of, uh, formulas and spreadsheets, and the very first paying version was, uh, less than a month, uh, after we started YC. So it was a very, it was very much-

Episode duration: 27:38