Avoiding Calendar Creep with Campfire’s John Glasgow

As founder, CEO and CFO of Campfire, a cloud-based ERP platform, John Glasgow is watching his calendar stretch across time zones. With offices in San Francisco, New York and London, he’s managing expansion while keeping family time on the schedule.

“My week runs on ruthless prioritization,” Glasgow told CFO Upside. “Two things get my time: Campfire and my family.” He’s in the San Francisco office five days a week and tries to make it home for his kids’ bedtime, often taking calls on the commute. His family recently joined him in London and Amsterdam, where he squeezed in work around nap time and on flights.

Glasgow admitted that he is picky about invitations. “Since founding the company, I only attend events that I’m speaking at or a very high-quality founder event,” he said. An AI offsite featuring the founders of OpenAI and Anthropic recently made the cut.

The Boss’ Backup

Big company decisions get a review at home via Glasgow’s wife, who has had a successful tech career and is “my most trusted person in the world,” he said. “She brings a different perspective, so she always thinks of things that I didn’t.”

His identical twin brother, Ryan Glasgow, founder and CEO of Sprig, an AI-powered survey and customer research platform, provides another sounding board.

Inside Campfire, Glasgow is figuring out how much work he can hand off. “I’m in every Slack channel with every customer, not because I respond to everyone, but I want to know about the good and the bad,” he said. Agents help digest those conversations, and Campfire’s finance leader, previously a customer, takes some customer calls.

Still wearing the CFO and CEO hats, Glasgow knows his own availability has limits. “I am very aware that a CEO answering calls doesn’t scale,” he said.

CEO Ambition Versus CFO Caution

Campfire raised a $65 million Series B co-led by Accel and Ribbit in October 2025, just 12 weeks after its $35 million Series A. That gives Glasgow more capital to work with, but also comes with competing ideas about where it should go.

Some of those decisions come down to office rent, as Glasgow said additional locations like their new London and New York offices help recruit accountants who won’t relocate to San Francisco. The space also puts engineers near the employees fielding customer problems.

His biggest bet for 2027, he said, is accelerating investment in Ember, Campfire’s AI product. But his CFO instincts spur questions.

“The CFO in me wants to pull back and lean on third-party AI like Claude,” he said. “The CEO in me thinks there’s an opportunity to fundamentally rethink corporate finance, and owning the AI agents and model is the only way to deliver on this vision.”

Delegating to AI means deciding what deserves a human’s attention, and in the product, Campfire customers set those limits themselves. “If it can’t be explained, a person reviews it before it posts,” Glasgow said.

Allocating Calendar Capital. Glasgow applies a similar filter to requests for his own time. His advice to finance leaders: “Pick your two things to say no to now because the calendar will pick for you otherwise.”