How Finance Leaders Use AI to Kill Legacy ERP and Achieve Day Zero Close with John Glasgow
In this episode of Future Finance, hosts Paul Barnhurst and Glenn Hopper welcome John Glasgow, founder and CEO of Campfire, a modern AI-native ERP system designed for finance teams. The discussion centers on why traditional ERPs are no longer meeting the needs of growing businesses and how Campfire is offering a new solution built with automation and finance-first design. John shares insights from his career in finance and explains how his own challenges inspired the creation of Campfire.
John is the founder and CEO of Campfire, an ERP platform developed for mid-sized and enterprise finance teams. With prior roles at Adobe and Invoice2Go, where he led strategic finance and corporate development, John has experienced firsthand the limitations of legacy ERP systems. Campfire, backed by Y Combinator and Foundation Capital, is rethinking the general ledger using AI to accelerate financial reporting, reduce manual work, and help finance professionals focus on strategic insights.
In this episode, you will discover:
Why companies are replacing legacy ERPs like NetSuite and what they look for in a modern solution.
What a modern general ledger looks like, and how AI can support, not replace finance teams.
Why finance leaders need systems that enable real-time visibility and decision-making.
How strategic accounting is becoming a core part of modern finance.
John shared his insightful journey from finance leader to founder, making this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in modernizing finance through technology. His experiences in building an AI-native ERP, tackling the challenges of traditional systems, and redefining the role of finance offer valuable lessons for professionals seeking to drive efficiency, accuracy, and strategic value in their organizations.
Follow John:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnglasgow/
Website - https://campfire.ai/
Join hosts Glenn and Paul as they unravel the complexities of AI in finance:
Follow Glenn:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbhopperiii
Follow Paul:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguy
Follow QFlow.AI:
Website - https://bit.ly/4fYK9vY
Future Finance is sponsored by QFlow.ai, the strategic finance platform solving the toughest part of planning and analysis: B2B revenue. Align sales, marketing, and finance, speed up decision-making, and lock in accountability with QFlow.ai.
Stay tuned for a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the future of finance and what it means for businesses and individuals alike.
In Today’s Episode:
[04:36] - Career Journey & Inspiration
[06:35] - From Finance to Founder
[10:12] - Day-Zero Close & Real-Time Finance
[14:58] - Modern vs. Legacy Ledgers
[19:48] - The Case for a New ERP Tool
[23:14] - Campfire’s AI in Action
[28:20] - Key Differences: FP&A vs. Accounting
[31:17] - How to Humanize Finance
[35:08] - Wrap-Up & Takeaways
Full Show Transcript:
[00:01:21] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Welcome to another episode of Future Finance. Thrilled to have you here with us. And of course, I'm here today again with my co-host Glenn Hopper. Really excited to have him. He looks very dapper today with his haircut. Might let him tell that story sometime. Probably not today though, but we're thrilled to also have John Glasgow with us. John, welcome to the show.
[00:02:10] Guest: John Glasgow: Thank you both for having me. I'm really excited to be here today.
[00:02:13] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I'm really excited to have you. And you could probably guess we're going to talk about his company, which is Glenn in his background there if you're watching this on video campfire. So John is the founder and CEO of campfire, a modern AI native ERP built for mid-sized and enterprise finance teams backed by Y Combinator and Foundation Capital. Campfire is rethinking the general ledger with AI powered workflows that streamline accounting and accelerate financial reporting. Before founding Campfire, John led partnership at Buildcon following its $625 million acquisition of Invoice to Go, where he played a key role in corporate development. He also held senior finance roles at Adobe and helped lead strategy at Magento Commerce through its acquisition. John again. Welcome. I love the background and am excited to have you.
[00:03:06] Guest: John Glasgow: Thank you so much. Yeah, I've been in finance my whole career, so unsurprisingly decided to double down on the category.
[00:03:13] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I could imagine you never dealt with any pain, right? In the finance category.
[00:03:16] Guest: John Glasgow: Were you never dealt with outdated software in my life?
[00:03:20] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Well, definitely get more into that during the show. But first, you know, here there's a big announcement that you're just sharing with the market. And that is a big deal for a campfire. You want to talk a little bit about that?
[00:03:33] Guest: John Glasgow: Yeah. It's a great question as we just announced that we've raised a $35 million series A led by Accel Partners, thrilled to have them on the cap table given such a phenomenal franchise. And, um, the quick story there was the partner that I'm keeping up with actually, was the series an investor at invoice to go. So we're getting back together, you know, arguably a much bigger category instead of R, which is all that we did through that $650 million exit. Now the general ledger and we have R as well. And we can talk about it, but just had a great experience working with John at invoice to go and and excited to to work with him again.
[00:04:14] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I love it. It's always great when you get to work with people you've worked with before and you trust and you can have that experience. I know you've had a diverse background. You've led everything from M&A at Union Square Advisors to Strategic Finance, Adobe and Worldcom. How does that experience inform the way you're building and thinking about campfires? Right. Not just as a product, but as a company. How is your kind of background in your career helping prepare you for what you're doing now?
[00:04:41] Guest: John Glasgow: Yeah, it's a great question. The founding story here was really solving my own pain. And so I spent way too many years of my life in Excel. But the key moment was I didn't want to go. We were going to sell it to build. We actually ended up not hiring a banker, because we were planning to do a $100 million series deal and ultimately went the sale route, but we had 500 diligence requests and fielding them all. Not all. Most were fielded out of a spreadsheet because our accounting software did not have the reporting that we needed. And that was a seminal moment for me. The other big one was at Baucom and spent a lot of time with the general Ledger, and we can talk about this a little more later. But just like campfire is a culmination of my life's experiences working in finance to, again, just like solve all of the pains I've had along the way.
[00:05:37] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: Thinking about the problems you went through dealing with. We've all been there, and especially if you're on the ERP implementation side, if you're ever in one of those projects, it can just be a nightmare. The only thing that I could think that might be harder than that is being a founder of a startup and you said.
[00:05:54] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: You're going to stay giving birth.
[00:05:55] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: Yeah.
[00:05:58] Guest: John Glasgow: My wife would say giving birth, and I tend to agree with her on this.
[00:06:02] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: But yeah. Well, men here, we better agree, right?
[00:06:05] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: But interestingly, with your background, I mean, I feel like being a CFO for 15 years, the idea of being a founder, I always liked to be the guy off to the side that was just answering questions. And a lot of times the adult in the room was because a lot of times the founders always picture the WeWork guy running around with long hair and bare feet and all that. Someone's got to talk to the board and the investors and all that. So I always felt separated from the founders. But you have said that you always wanted to be a founder. And I'm wondering, as you went through your career, how did that long term vision shape your career decisions along the way, or the way that you approached finance and the way you were working?
[00:06:42] Guest: John Glasgow: It did. I'm certainly not a Mark Zuckerberg were right out of school, I can just go start a $1 trillion business. I actually did have a startup. That was my first job out of college. I was a founder and I quickly learned I was just not ready. I had really no edge. I think as a founder, you need to have an edge in a category or you need something unique because sheer will and effort don't cut it when everybody is putting in the same 100 hour weeks as a founder. So what's something unique I can bring to the market? And, you know, it took me about 15 years to get there, but I circled all the way back to being a founder again, you know, and this is a category I kind of spent so much time in and that I felt there was something I could bring to the table.
[00:07:24] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: Yeah, definitely having that domain expertise and know, having felt the pain that finance leaders do with the existing systems, I'm sure drove a lot of this.
[00:07:34] Guest: John Glasgow: It really did. Um, yeah. And it's something like your comment there of like, you know, finance folks are about execution. I think it's been really helpful because like, this category is super hard to do. Right? A new GL is just like everyone was like I was out fundraising back at our seed and it was, you know, more of an idea at that point. And everyone's like, are you sure you don't want to take on something you don't want to do invoicing again or you don't, you don't want to take off a feature of NetSuite. And I said, no, you know, I've been on an invoice to go. We did R and Bill, we did AP. I've been on both sides of the ledger. I know this category well, and I know how broken the category is. Um, and so it was a massive swing. I think that was the constant feedback I heard from the fundraisers. Like, this is such a massive swing. You know, Morgan Stanley calls this the largest category in software. And so it's just a massive market, but it's also a daunting market. And so the execution comes out of finance, since that's really what we again, deliver on. Um, but then the vision, you know, I would argue largely came out of just sitting in the seat, living the pain, being there on a I mean, I had a diligence call the day of my wedding because our data was not in a good spot on the financial side. Yeah, I never want any of our customers to do a diligence call on the day of their wedding. And so here really, um, just a small way of trying to pay it forward and, and play a small part in our customer success.
[00:09:10] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: And we're glad you lived to tell that story.
[00:09:13] Guest: John Glasgow: Are you still married? So.
[00:09:17] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I know a guy who got a call. His wife was giving birth the day out. He had to step out for work with something that got on, you know, working in finance. And unfortunately, sometimes it happens, right? It's you don't want it to ever happen. Those are the type of events that you shouldn't have to be able to step out. So I love what you said there.
[00:09:33] Guest: John Glasgow: Yeah. There's just so much cyclicality in the role. Like around month and quarter on year end board prep that it's because of the it's the prep work of it's the it's the clothes. It's the, you know, preparing the slides. If we could just shorten the time to close while still keeping you confident, if we could just shorten the board prep by automating some of the deeper ad hoc analysis. Page 84. The board likes to see an ad hoc report. If we could, to speed up some of that, then I'd like to think we can give you some of that time back. But I'd also like to focus on more strategic work, which is like delivering on the insights.
[00:10:12] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I'm going to go a little rogue here. Glenn. You led me to think of a question that wasn't on our list, but we hear so much about this idea of continuous close, eventually getting to day zero or shortening the close kind of. What's your thoughts? I mean, most companies are, you know, 3 to 15, depending on whether they're small or large. I would say today there might be a few that are day two, but we really don't have anyone that's doing the day zero or continuous close. So what do you think about that at a campfire? Because I'm sure you've had more than a few discussions on this subject and how to speed it up. So up. I'd love to just maybe get a little bit of thoughts there.
[00:10:46] Guest: John Glasgow: Certainly on the smaller side of our customers, we've seen them get to that day zero. I think on the larger ones, they like to put a little more rigor. There's like, you know, they like to manually do some work. But we have dramatically reduced the close time for customers. We had someone moved from NetSuite that went from like a 14 day to a three day close when they moved to campfire. So we're seeing dramatic acceleration. I do think everyone's going to end up on a zero day. I think it's just a matter of starting with the smaller ones and going up. I think what is hard to do there is zero day with confidence, like really getting the accruals right. Really. Like how do you get your flex commentary adjustments. You know, you know on a day zero like there's the larger companies I think um, there's still some rigor to be done. And then to your point, what's after zero day close is continuous. Right now, the smallest unit of time in accounting is really a month. Like you throw all of your accruals in the last day of the month, but so you can't do that in a, in a, in a smaller window than a month, right? Because you have to rethink things like accruals.
[00:11:51] Guest: John Glasgow: You got to rethink some of the processes. And um, a weekly, you know, a daily close. It's kind of crazy to think about, but it does seem like that is where the world is going. The reason for the month is just because it takes so long to close them up. But if you can really accelerate the time to close, then you can actually. Are we doing a weekly now and then you have a tighter feedback loop for executive decision making and for insights at the company where everyone's not saying, hang on, let me, let me get the numbers in 12 days or something. We're just like looking at things as they're unraveling in real time and making decisions off of that. So I, Paul, I do think it'll get there. I think there's work to be done. And then after that, is that to your point, after zero days it will be continuous.
[00:12:43] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: I think a lot of the companies that I came into would be smaller, like PE backed companies, and when I'd get there they'd have a 30 day close, which seems insane, you know? And so we'd be all excited to get them down to ten days. But everybody is just expecting real time information right now, it seems archaic to have to wait to close the books. So they want preliminary estimates and estimates as the month goes along. And to your point, I mean, it's not as simple as just, you know, reporting a stat because there are all the accruals and other entries that happen through the month. But um, getting to that I think is really it's the future of it's the expectation now. And, you know, even though it's right now for the most part, an unrealistic expectation in a lot of ways, at least getting directionally right and getting close to it, something they can report on.
[00:13:28] Guest: John Glasgow: Yeah. And I think what's making it even more unrealistic is folks are being told you're getting no new headcount, right? It's like the company's growing. They're saying hold the line on headcount in Ghana. Ghana. Everyone's being told, like you got to hold the line. Um, there's some incremental growth, but it's not nearly as keeping up with the pace of the business as it used to. You know, you used to go from 3 to 30 accountants as you scaled. Now people are being told you go 3 to 5. And so there's this confine of like, how do I get all of this done with five when the business has five axes, you know, and um, and so manual tasks that scale more linearly. Spreadsheet work, transactional accounting that's being done manually really needs to be automated. And that's where we're seeing I come in, which is like the only way to do it with five people with such a large growth in data and volume and accruals is automation. And so that's that's where we've been really excited to partner with our customers.
[00:14:30] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: I love that you mentioned AI because Paul knows that's my favorite thing to ramble on about. But I'm not going to do that. Now I'm going to ask you, um, talking about? I, um, I know campfire is part of this wave of modern finance tools that are rethinking the general ledger. And I'm thinking about the modern ledger that people are moving towards where, you know, think back to whatever it was in the 15th century, the ledger accounting first came about. What does a modern ledger mean in practice, and how is it different from the legacy systems?
[00:15:03] Guest: John Glasgow: Yeah, there's three pillars for us. Um, one is like, we allow them to close faster. We allow them to close with more confidence, and then we unlock financial insights. So across those three pillars, um, it boils down to moving away from being a system of record and more of a system of action. So our AI will, you can say, draft my accruals for the month off a three month trailing average, and it'll literally go through and you can use our chat interface to do that accrual. Or we can just have automation running throughout all the transactional accounting. And it is helping folks on all three of those pillars today. So we're seeing material gains across those three topics, and happy to dive into any of them in more detail. But a lot of customers say, hey, like whether it's flex commentary or this really custom report, that there's no way of generating it in a legacy ERP, um, there's just work that previously was not able to be automated now can be automated with AI. So the CFO told us the other day at a company with hundreds of millions in RR, I was asked, you know, they're like we needed to generate a day's overdue in invoices paid on average by customer segment. And that's like a multi report mashup out of other systems. And the AI literally merged all the reports for them, put all the data in a clean format and then gave it into like, a clean, exportable, format.
[00:16:37] Guest: John Glasgow: So it's performing like the first pass and everything. We've also seen, though, that finance and accounting has been, um, according to McKinsey, like one of the slowest to adopt AI. And there's a lot of, like, valid reasons for that. But we have really asked our customers to approach AI as if it's someone on your team that like, when I was in finance, I would never just take a model and ship the output to the board. I'm like, give me the model, I'm going to go review. I need to understand how we got here and similar things. We've built our AI in a way that it's fully auditable, like meeting with big people to really get them comfortable with, uh, the auditability of our AI. And again, it is treated like someone on your team and it shows all of its work. It pulls the sub ledgers, it's exportable. And so it's, it's that new team member that, uh, you still would want to do their work And just like someone you just hired, you know, you wouldn't want to just, like, fire them on day one. You give them feedback. You train them. Um, there's a working relationship. You learn how they work. And again, we've seen this. The most success is if you follow those two pillars of treated like someone on the team, um, and then really collaborating with them through the journey to, to learn the best way to work together.
[00:17:57] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Really solid advice there. I mean, so many people think I can just put it into AI. They'll give me an answer. In a way, I go. So my favorites are when you see someone on LinkedIn, we're at the bottom. Would you like me to make any changes to this comment or this post where.
[00:18:10] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: They.
[00:18:10] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Copy the full, they copy the whole thing in, right? We've all seen it and you're just like, okay, you know, there might have been some good message in there, but you lost everybody.
[00:18:19] Guest: John Glasgow: Yeah. No, it's, um, but there's a lot of AI fatigue, and it's hard to evaluate AI until you buy the product and you use it on your own data. So a lot of folks are like, that's cool, your AI, but like, you know, let's make sure it's real. And so we've gone through some great lengths to get customers comfortable that like, it is real and we are adding real value. But yeah, it's a great call out Paul.
[00:18:40] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Ever feel like you go to market teams and finance speak different languages? This misalignment is a breeding ground for failure in pairing the predictive power of forecasts and delaying decisions that drive efficient growth. It's not for lack of trying, but getting all the data in one place doesn't mean you've gotten everyone on the same page. Meet QFlow.ai, the strategic finance platform purpose-built to solve the toughest part of planning and analysis of B2B revenue. Q flow quickly integrates key data from your go-to-market stack and accounting platform, then handles all the data prep and normalization. Under the hood, it automatically assembles your go-to-market stats, makes segmented scenario planning a breeze, and closes the planning loop. Create air-tight alignment, improve decision latency, and ensure accountability across the team.
[00:19:48] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. And, you know, kind of leads me to a question. Obviously, we all at times deal with fatigue. It's super exciting. We also have those moments like, wow, did I just do that in 10s that used to take me five hours? Are you kidding me? Right? We've all experienced some of that. But why? Why do we need a new ERP tool? Why do we need something? Campfire? Can it just be done by the legacy players? I'd love to kind of get your reasoning. I mean, we've all dealt with some of the pain, but what was your thinking of why it needed to be a new company?
[00:20:18] Guest: John Glasgow: Yeah, well, if they had been great, I, I, someone would have told me about it by now. But, uh, I think, you know, a lot of our customers are ripping out nets. Netsuite or ripping out other ERPs and saying, we have seen what you have built here, not only today, but we we know where you're going and we, you know, we're making a long term partnership decision, and we just see that you're going to be the right approach for how we're thinking. And so will the legacy providers ship some? I probably will be ten, you know, ten years ahead or some vector of time ahead at that time and always like, yes. Um, so the velocity and we do hear from customers, you know, we our product velocity, you know, we like to think of ourselves as like a ramp for accounting or ramp is very proud of their product velocity that um, we think about legacy providers a lot, but, um, we know the market is very ripe given the amount of innovation has really not been there in the last ten years in this category. I think. Why a new one I partnered with all the ledgers at Bill. I mean, we're a billion in error and I led partnerships there. And, you know, we were the largest partner for many of these GLS. And so at the executive level, at the sea level, you know, I was maintaining relationships with them. I'm not new to this category. You know, I've spent a lot of time with the GLS, all four of the big ones. And um, that honestly, what got me even more excited about this category.
[00:21:57] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: As an incumbent right now, you think about NetSuite, how many customers they have and how you know, it's still not suited necessarily, but they're I mean, the interface feels very much like when NetSuite first came out, it feels dated and it's kind of and that but that consistency, if you think about the finance and accounting market that they're they've got to be like, if you hear Evan Goldberg talk, he will talk about generative AI and how it's the future and how it needs to roll in, but it's the risk for them of of breaking something or the fear that they, they have in breaking something with a tool that people have used for years. It's got to be a tough time to be an incumbent right now, because how do they figure out how to, uh, how to shift and compete with upstarts like campfire? And I'm thinking, obviously ERP is a massive, massive project to take on, but the advantage you have is you do get to rethink everything about the way we do it. So when you were talking about the modern ledger and everything that makes sense, but the incumbents, how would they even tackle that? It's kind of, I don't want to say an impossible situation, but a difficult situation where great, they've got the market share now, but how are they going to adjust? And I'm wondering, since you do have this clean slate platform and you've been through all those pains, and as you build a campfire out, how are you thinking about AI and what's the like? Are there some features that you have out right now that you're really proud of that you like to talk about, that our AI leader that are just kind of like you said with the modern ledger, just a reinvention of the tools that we've been using for all these years.
[00:23:28] Guest: John Glasgow: All great points. And it's a great question just in terms of what I'm most proud of on our I look, we do a lot of things like transactional accounting. And I think everybody is getting to coding a transaction or doing a bank rack. Like I think that's quickly, if not already automated by everybody. Um, we've got the flux commentary, which I think is we're seeing a lot of folks do as well, but we consistently hear from, you know, folks that select us as their ERP and from the venture community going through the round we just went through, that campfire has the best AI. Um, we just hear that consistently that we have the best AI in the mid-market. And the reason for that is, um, whether it's me coming from the category, knowing exactly where to go or just we're in San Francisco. I, you know, coming out of YC, everyone in my batch did I and so, um, you know, think about AI all day. So it's been foundational for us. I mean, we I think we're the one of the only, um, girls that was founded after the AI boom. And so we've been able to really do this, um, in an AI native way. But the feature I'm most proud of is probably the stuff that most of our, if not any of our competitors have gotten to. You can upload your previous board minutes into the campfire, and it will write board commentary for you with all your financial data for this quarter's financial data, relative to all of the board chatter from the last board meeting.
[00:24:59] Guest: John Glasgow: Um, you can upload your technical accounting memo and on a 606 memo, it'll go through every single of the five steps and go through every single customer contract as a part of your close and say step four for your Adobe contract does not align to your technical accounting policy. You can upload marketing data by buy channel into a campfire and have it leave to CAK by channel. And so you can hydrate third party data sets with campfires data. But we have whether you're a stripe or whether you're on Brex, we've got all cash in, all cash out. And then layering in non-financial data. We've seen some really impressive use cases from our customers. I think, candidly, our customers with hundreds of millions in are using the AI the most because the challenges thrown at them are much more complex. And so I think the off the shelf reporting is, is often woefully insufficient. And so they have like going back to that very customer part I mentioned earlier, they have seen like this very bespoke or large data sets that they can take us in ways that they previously were not able to.
[00:26:10] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: That's amazing. I just think of everything you were as you're going through the list. I was just picturing the effort that had to go through each of those and thinking about that just being part of the system right now. I mean, that is. Yeah. I can see why the incumbent players are having an existential threat right now. I mean, this is world changing.
[00:26:29] Guest: John Glasgow: My team spent three weeks building LTV to Kak by product at Adobe. I mean, we're we're we're now doing it in a, in a, you know, a matter of 20 minutes.
[00:26:40] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Glenn's just like, man, I want this back. I was.
[00:26:47] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: So I started shaking with some PTSD from all the work.
[00:26:52] Guest: John Glasgow: I had a lot of Saturday nights in the office as an example. Uh, so. No. Well.
[00:26:59] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, we've all had those moments in those Excel models. Really? Am I still doing this?
[00:27:04] Guest: John Glasgow: Yeah. But I mean, to this point, like, I was strategic finance at Adobe and my team analyzed all historical data. Um, and I and accounting just prepared the numbers. But all of them, like LTV to kak, you know, was a historical data analysis project. I truly believe that strategic accounting is where accounting is going. Um, and so I think that analyzing historical data should be done by strategic accounting. Now, like this new kind of pillar that people aren't really talking about yet. And strategic finance is going to be more of the forward looking pull your world on FNA, right? I truly think that accounting needs to step into strategic work and meeting with the head of marketing and talking through, hey, let's redirect ad spend from Google to to LinkedIn. But here's the efficiency metrics by channel. I think, you know, it's time for accounting to really own historical analysis. And this is going to be a narrower role for finance. But there's so much data for finance. So there's still plenty to do. Uh that that's my hot take for today.
[00:28:13] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Oh we got it. We got a clip right there. And I was gonna say he kind of ruined my joke that I always say if cantons become strategic, I can no longer say, what's the difference between an FPA and a professional? An accountant. You know this, John? I don't know this one.
[00:28:25] Guest: John Glasgow: I'm not.
[00:28:26] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: When an accountant gets creative, they go to jail. When an FP and a professional gets creative, they get promoted. If accounting is starting to be strategic and doing more and more of the stuff, I can't joke that they're going to jail when they're creative. Thanks a lot, John.
[00:28:41] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: I think Andrew Fastow would show that there is a limit to the creativity that if I start.
[00:28:47] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Well, he's the prime example of the jail, right? So there we go.
[00:28:50] Guest: John Glasgow: I think to that point though, like at Macy's for years, someone was incorrectly doing accounting and they were rolling it forward until it became a massive number. I think with AI, like I've never had an autonomous driving car here in San Francisco. Waymo is everywhere. They're never honking at you, right? They're always following. They're never speeding. We found our AI being really good at auditing human work, and that is a way that, you know, you can remove the opportunity, whether it's error or fraud in the Macy's example. And you know, I am going to be objective. You can't say I'll get ten K to go do this. It's just going to be like this is straight up wrong, you know, and it's going to call it out. And if we don't let you close until it's rectified, then we'd like to think we can help clean up those corner cases. When you mentioned it, you know what the biggest one ever can be. We like to think we could be helpful there.
[00:29:45] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: You know a great example. And this is more Excel. But I was talking to somebody who started a company and they were analyzing a government model with their tool. They built a tool to help analyze models and stuff in Excel. And they found a $170 million mistake in the model they were using for a contract. Wow. Because they went through and analyzed it and were able to help them fix it.
[00:30:03] Guest: John Glasgow: Okay.
[00:30:04] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Right. Well, those types of things are huge, and I sport those much better than we do as a human, especially a big, huge model in Excel. Right. We've all seen it where you're like, oh, crud. Now I gotta go tell the board I'm going to be 3 million off because we screwed up. We put the wrong rate here or whatever it might be. I mean, if you've worked in finance long enough, you've had to do that.
[00:30:23] Guest: John Glasgow: I have unfortunately done that many times. Yes.
[00:30:26] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I figured you had. And I know Glen has and I certainly have. All right. So we have this fun section we like to do since we're in I show, you know, future finance. I took the questions we had for you, your profile, what it could find on the internet, and came up with 25 unique, fun, personal questions that we could ask you. Oh, wow. And so here's the way it works for me. Glen does it a little differently. So we both take a different approach to have a little fun. Here you can pick a number between 1 and 25 and I'll ask that question. Or we can remove the human in the loop. And I can use the random number generator to pick the question.
[00:31:01] Guest: John Glasgow: Let's do.
[00:31:01] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Ten. All right. He didn't even hesitate. He's like, I got it. All right, here we go. I haven't seen these questions, so let's see what we get today. Sometimes it could be interesting. So here we go. You emphasized the value of strong business partnerships. What's your favorite way to humanize finance for technical teams?
[00:31:22] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: That's a weird question, Paul. It is.
[00:31:24] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I'm not going to lie, but that's what it came up with today.
[00:31:28] Guest: John Glasgow: Stay out of the financial model when you're meeting with them and tell a story. And whenever I would meet with a business partner I would say we have the same objective. I get the goal if you get the goal. Because truly. Right. Like if you had a plan I had planned. Um, yeah.
[00:31:44] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: And you get a bonus. Odds are I've got a bonus too.
[00:31:47] Guest: John Glasgow: And we are aligned on the outcome here. But we also have a plan to hit not, you know, on the top line, but on the bottom line. Um, and I think the other one is instead of staying out of the model, like go, go grab coffee with them, go take them to lunch. Just make this like we work together. I'm not here to just say no to everything. We're aligned on a shared outcome. But I'm a human, too. You know, I think folks, you know, receive policies and and is, you know, what finance and accounting are known for. But it's like, how do we help you get the goal? And I tell them, that's my job.
[00:32:20] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I love that answer. Great answer. Way to nail the question. We never know what they're going to ask. So that's the fun of I. I'm waiting for me to ask one. And somebody goes, because sometimes they'll put personal stuff about somebody else. I never did that because I picked up the wrong person. I know it's going to happen eventually, and then it'll be our moment of. You can't always trust me. There should be a human in the loop. Right, Glenn. And that's how Glenn does it a little differently. So tell us how you do yours. Glenn. Do it.
[00:32:44] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: Well, first off, I want to say that the mark of a great CEO is the ability to, uh, just take a random, off the wall question and give a valid good answer. So I think Paul, you and I would be stumbling and, uh, uh, trying to divert. I think the way I do mine differently is since I created it, I just take the human out of the loop completely and just say, pick one of these at random and let's see what it came up with. All right. This is similar to the one the other day. So I think we're in some kind of eye loop, but it's okay. It's a I don't know if we ended up asking it, but it's on another list too. Um, but here the question is, if campfire were a superhero, what would it superpower be? Automation, lasers, real time X-ray vision or something? Even weirder is that.
[00:33:30] Guest: John Glasgow: Wow. How about, um, walking on hot coals? Which is something I've never done, but we're campfire, and so, uh, that's that's the theme here. We've named our AI ember, uh, Ember off the coals, but, um, that'd be the. I wouldn't say that's something weirder, but it's something else.
[00:33:50] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: I love it, I love it.
[00:33:51] Guest: John Glasgow: I've never walked on hot coals, by the way. I think I'm too afraid to do that. But, uh, has anyone here done that?
[00:33:58] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I have not done that. Maybe we could have an episode where we all give it a try. Okay.
[00:34:03] Guest: John Glasgow: Let's do it. You can interview me, uh, walking on hot coals.
[00:34:07] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: Yeah, that's that's perfect. If you can still give valid and reasonable answers while doing that, then that's.
[00:34:16] Guest: John Glasgow: Being a founder. Sometimes I feel like I'm, uh, walking in hot coals in an ice bath at the same time. Uh, well, while giving my attempt at a reasonable answer.
[00:34:25] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Oh, I'm sure you do. You have a whole team in a company. You know, Glenn and I are both entrepreneurs, but it's us, which is quite different when you have responsibility for a bunch of people.
[00:34:35] Guest: John Glasgow: Well, you guys know this. Well, I mean, people say, what's it like? And I'm like, it's, um, you know, you buy a McDonald's because you want to, like, just take the cash flow and someone doesn't show up one day and you're making fries that day. You know, it's, uh, as a founder, you know, I was fixing the coffee machine this morning. Uh, everything. Everything rolls up to you. So you're a, you know, whether it's you're the only person in the company or whether there's a large business, um, still rolls up to you. And so I think that's a key, key theme that you both know very well.
[00:35:08] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Thank you so much, John. It's been a pleasure having you on. I mean, I've been following you for a while. I've loved what campfire is doing. Really excited for you. Congratulations on the raise. I mean, that's huge. I know you'll use that money well to continue to grow. And good luck, because we're all excited to see more modern, you know, accounting ledgers and really excited to see campfire continue what it's doing in AI and what it's doing in this space. So thanks.
[00:35:31] Guest: John Glasgow: Thank you so much for having me today.
[00:35:33] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: All right. Thanks, John.
[00:35:34] Guest: John Glasgow: All right. Take care.
[00:35:36] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Thanks for listening to the Future Finance Show. And thanks to our sponsor, QFlow.ai. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review on your podcast platform of choice, and may your robot overlords be with you.