Non-Technical, No Co-Founder, $100M+ Raised | John Glasgow, Campfire

0:00John Glasgow:You should have a co-founder if you're non-technical was always the pitch to people like me. Now, I don't think that's true. With the ability to write code with AI now, anybody can be a solo founder. Why large companies move so slow is the sheer amount of cohesion and coordination required to do anything at all. At a small level, co-founders have that too. What's the bear case for being a solo founder? The odds of success as a founder are so low, you need every single tailwind you can get because the expected value is zero. So it's 2023, you find a co-founder, you apply with an idea, you get into YC, and then you end up being solo sort of after going all in.

0:37John Glasgow:You might have a debate with your co-founder on is that a good use of time. When you're a solo founder, you have so much clarity of what to do next and where to go. 66 % of companies fail because of co-founder breakups. Being a solo founder, you don't have that risk. There's no better way to do it than just solo. A great place to start off would be to talk about how you actually came to start a company with your brother, who's also a founder and is running a Series B company now. So I'm curious what that experience was like first, how you decided you wanted to start a company together. Yeah, it's a great question.

1:11John Glasgow:First, thanks for having me on the show. My brother and I, and it brings up this classic nature versus nurture because we're identical twin brothers. and we grew up in San Jose so maybe that's the nature piece of like Apple was down the street like Intel was there like tech was kind of everywhere in the 90s growing up but ultimately we even had like a iPod accessory online store in high school and you could buy like iPod cases and I'd like step out of class take a customer support call so we were always a little entrepreneurial and again maybe it's a bit of the nature and nurture there but then yeah right when we both graduated college we both went to school in san diego we decided to start a company which looks a lot like what pinterest ended up being around social shopping and social kind of aggregation and run social around pictures and learned a lot in that experience but i think my biggest takeaway was needed to get a lot of life skills and needed to really find a category that had some unique insights like my ability to help people shop or do something there ultimately found I didn't have anything unique to me but uh being a co-founder with him I mean we were living together as well and so there was like uh we would wake up um and we would walk over to our kind of computers and then we would work all day and we would walk back to bed and it was just some days we didn't leave the room at all.

2:38John Glasgow:And so having a co-founder and building with him, and this was almost 20 years ago now. And so then just went on to have a finance career for, call it 15, a little 15 years between then and starting Campfire. It was quite a journey until I became a second time founder. When you guys started out working together, I think it was just really useful because people are listening, they're thinking about, should I have a co-founder? If I have a co-founder, Who should it be? And traditionally, they say, go and work with somebody that you've worked with previously or somebody that you know really well.

3:14Siblings are not as common, but they're somebody that, in theory, you know pretty well. Was it sort of just an organic thing that kind of said, hey, we're both interested in something. We're going to start a company together. What was the actual origin of deciding to work together? And how did you actually sort of align on that? Or was it just sort of an organic thing?

3:32John Glasgow:Yeah, we really wanted to start a company together. And so we just worked through a lot of ideas together. and a lot of late nights prototyping and iterating. And obviously it's way before Vibe coding and the speed of code was much different back then. But yeah, we just were like, hey, we really want to do this together. It was like an active decision. And so all of the ideas kind of came out of us working together, him and more on the technical side, me and more on the business side. And that was really the focus at the time for that one. Now the company that you ended up working on, you said is sort of like something that kind of is like modern day Pinterest, but quite a while, it was early in a lot of ways.

4:05is could you share a little bit more about how you ended up deciding to work on that idea together? Like, was there one person who was really driving the idea search? Were you all working on it together? Because I think that ultimately, sometimes when you look at co-founders, there's one person who's kind of like the idea sort of originator and the other person who's really excited to just work on something that maybe can have momentum or, you know, can have a really big sort of opportunity to do something good in the world. So I'm curious kind of like how that actually played out between the two of you yeah it's a great question we would um i mean

4:40John Glasgow:we obviously would go shopping together because we live together for clothes and would like look online because you know classic guy like i don't like going to the store and like shopping for clothes and trying everything on and so like when i was just shopping online i remember like being on the nordstrom website and there was just like i don't like 100 pages of shoes and like 99 of the pages were like these are the worst shoes in the world like who would ever buy these and it felt like the long tail of the catalog like nobody wanted to look at and there's a lot of like noise in online catalogs and then you would go on to amazon and god if you're ready to look for clothes on amazon it's even longer tail of of things people don't want and so then it was like well how do we surface any of you kind of think we're pinterest is today how do we surface things that are actually like people want to see or shoes people want to see or clothes someone might want to buy and then could you build like a collection of items that you'd want to buy so then when you're browsing macy's or nordstrom or any website you can like save an item you can build a little catalog of of clothes or things you'd want to buy but then other people could look at other clothes that are popular and they can like skip all of the noise and just look at signal and then you know fashion is very subjective of course but then the ability to see what maybe more fashionable people are buying or looking at or finding some website you had never heard of and finding some great attire and that was really driven by both of us and maybe because we were identical twins but we had the same shopping challenge on browsing for shoes and clothes that um we just you know thought there was a lot of wading through terrible clothing and so how do we how do we solve that and help others surface uh high quality gear now ultimately you know it didn't work out you ended up not continuing working on it what was the i think that there's a there's a thing that everybody talks about it's like how do you come up with the idea i think that the thing most people don't talk about is like how to actually decide we should not work on this anymore maybe we shouldn't even be working on a company together anymore and i i'd love for you to share a little bit about what that realization was like maybe in hindsight maybe what you would have done differently uh yeah i think it would be really interesting for people to hear that yeah well i think um Look, consumer is incredibly hard.

6:55John Glasgow:And having now gone through Y Combinator, at least when I went through it in 2023, it was very hard to get funded for consumer. And I think in hindsight, I see why. It ends up being incredibly binary of either we're Facebook or we have no revenue at all and we don't go anywhere. um you know having gone on and working at places like adobe and seeing b2b like you can get to a million in in annual revenue and b2b there's like paths to like so sorry social consumer is is incredibly challenging category i think that was the inside in hindsight and we had this two-sided marketplace of we had to go we had to we had to have a network effect so we ended up like paying people to like shop and browse and help populate it and then we ended up like trying to onboard merchants to help kind of support us because some of them would block like some linking or they would like weren't weren't supportive of it at the time and so then it was for us it was like really hard to jump start it particularly because we didn't have a lot of funding and we'd have a lot of time because you know funding buys you time and um my my wife was actually early at pinterest so she still gives me a hard time about uh about that one but uh that That was the big insight for me was obviously on the social consumer, but I think also B2B.

8:18John Glasgow:And then I would just say like, what is your right to, I mean, we all shop, everybody in the world shops to some degree. So I didn't have anything unique there. And so, you know, the second time around, it was more of like, where was there something unique in a category that I had some experience that I felt could have more of a repeatable motion, which to me was B2B. Most people think that starting a company without a co-founder is a bad idea. We believe the opposite, that solo founding will become the default way great companies get started. And that's why we built the Solo Founders program, where solo founders spend three months in San Francisco building solo together.

8:54Our alumni say it's like having co-founders but getting to make their own decisions. And four cohorts in, we're starting to see just how much solo founders can accomplish. One secured a formal partnership with a major U.S. government institution just five months after incorporation. Another hit 20 ,000 GitHub stars and 3 million downloads. And a third got 2 million ARR before making a single hire. The demand for the program continues to grow. Our first cohort got 1 ,000 applications for six spots. Our fourth cohort got 4 ,500 for 10. And today we are officially opening applications for cohort five.

9:31We'll select about a dozen founders, I'll work closely with each of them, and we'll invest$100 ,000 in every company. We kick off September 10th. If you're building Solo or you're ready to start, apply at solofounders.com. You almost said the phrase, right to win. And I think it's a really important phrase and an important idea. Can you share a little bit more about what you've learned about that phrase and what it means and how founders should think about that?

9:58John Glasgow:Yeah, it really comes down to like Campfire were a finance offer for corporate finance teams. I had a 15 year corporate finance career before founding Campfire. And so right to win, you know, a lot of the YC founders before me, they've got some unique insight, or they've felt the pain. I think that's always a good one. but the right to win might end up being you've got engineering prowess in a category that others don't and maybe you don't actually have you maybe you've not felt the pain but there's something that you can do differently when founders tell me like i'm gonna outwork everybody i mean we're all doing you know 80 100 hours a week so that's not a right to win but it's going to be more of like do you have unique gonna go to market do you have some something that you know access to some celebrity network do you have something that you can use um to win the market and so again for me that was like felt the pain as a customer and lived the category and been in the category for a while second time around first time around in hindsight there was no right to win so the the really interesting part about all this is you decide to stop working on the first company and then you work for 15 years on something else like on a bunch of different companies before before you actually start your second company.

11:20A lot of times, you know, people just try and jump right to the next startup or have a very sort of limited period in between and kind of just jump back in. I think it's because they feel like they like the idea of being a founder. They want to be a founder. It didn't work out. In your case, you really like spent a great amount of time developing a lot of experiences that would lend itself to building a great company. Can you share a little bit more about was there any pressure to you know go and try and find another company idea what was what was it like at the at the end of the first company and the thing that kind of like kept you working on you know non-founder things that eventually led to you becoming a founder for the second time and much much more successfully yeah well we had raised a

12:07John Glasgow:little bit of for the first company the shopping one we'd raised some seed funding through our grad money together because we just graduated college and we went through all of it and was I'm fortunate that I can live with my parents and so I moved back home in San Jose and they're like you know we'll always have a roof over your head but ultimately like I had no money till my name I mean my literally my bank account was entirely empty I have a vivid memory of because I lived back at home you know my high school friends were in the area I went to go buy like chicken nuggets or something with them and I had like four dollars in my account and the nuggets were like five dollars and I called my dad I'm like dad can you like transfer like five dollars into my account and so I think the reason not to start a second company was like I was so poor I needed money and so I went and got a finance job and I just graduated for the finance degree you know less than a year prior but this was 2010 right after 2009 financial crisis and so getting any sort of finance job was almost impossible and so I just like anybody that would hire me and then I just went and worked and kind of built a little bit of a savings and was able to move out and move to San Francisco once I could afford rent in San Francisco and then just kept putting one foot in front of the other and kept building a career and I always thought about being a founder again but I never had this like strong pull or something of like wow I feel like that's something I could be really special at.

13:38John Glasgow:Like I never had that specific thought. And so I just kept going on in my career. But I would say the founder experience still allowed me to think very differently in the workplace, even in a large, you know, finance organization that I kind of operated like a founder, even if I wasn't one within a large company. And that was like, like an ownership mindset of the business and being really thoughtful with company resources and like really like putting in long hours and really, really having high conviction in the work that I did, even if I was, you know, one of tens of thousands of employees. So it was still a great experience and helpful, but it wasn't like, oh, I'm just going to keep working on this and subsequently keep launching ideas.

14:21John Glasgow:At that point, I just moved on. If you're at a relatively early stage startup, you're likely to have coworkers who are former founders. And oftentimes people look at that as a really positive thing when they're hiring is they want to try and hire people who have that agency or whatever that people say about founders, right? And I'm curious, sort of, did you come across any people like that when you're working at these larger organizations? What was that like? Maybe say a little bit more about what you learned working at larger organizations that maybe went on to help you when it came to actually serving them as customers.

15:01John Glasgow:Yeah, I would say I worked at a couple of large public companies, one of them being like Adobe, the largest company I've ever worked at. I worked at Fidelity Investments, which is private, but it's still an equally large organization. And I think deeply understanding, to your point on like when you learn how to sell back to them, but also partner with them, also just doing anything with them, building integration with them, learning the tectonic shifts and how people work within a very large organization. like i at adobe we spent a lot of time working with aws and the easiest way to get a deal done with aws was actually being the connective glue across aws itself like it's easier for you to connect the teams and for them to connect the teams one insight at adobe you can't just slack a co-worker at adobe you've never worked with like you'd get a warm intro to somebody else at adobe within adobe i mean you need a warm intro otherwise they won't respond and so i think just like deeply understanding procurement buying cycles i learned about innovation budgets at adobe like we had money that ultimately was like always up for just like being thrown at like ideas like an ai idea which should kind of be thrown at now or just like very low um very low procurement overhead on the purchasing decision and so then kind of like finding ways to sell into things like that to win like a pilot.

16:27John Glasgow:Those were some of the big insights. And then also just like when it's such a multi-threaded sale, finding your way to power and budget owners and what that looks like and asking the questions was really helpful on how I could go back and work with them. And were you on the other side of some of those transactions when you were inside of these large organizations? You actually saw it or is it more that you were sort of witnessing it and hearing about it? What was the actual kind of experience that you gained from being inside on the other side of the table? Yeah, I mean, I would say I was on the corporate finance team at Adobe and just very actionable.

17:01John Glasgow:I was like doing a lot of the vendor review as the buyer from a finance perspective and doing all of them, a lot of the math for like whether we were to buy software or not. And so literally being the finance person behind the buyer. So some, you know, product leader, someone would want to buy a large piece of software from a finance perspective, would support them on that decision. And so seeing how all that was done was just a very tactical example for the software purchasing journey. It's great because, you know, a lot of founders are, you know, former product leaders or former engineers, and they are the people who use the products at, you know, at these companies.

17:41But they usually aren't the person who's actually helping to like get through the work, the work, like, or purchase approval process. And I think that that's really interesting is there something that maybe you would you could share with folks who are kind of thinking about like navigating those types of sales processes things that maybe are not obvious uh things like i think the the whole idea i think to a lot of people they'd be shocked that you know teammates need to get introductions to each other at adobe are there other things like that that people should be aware of when it comes to working with these

18:12John Glasgow:large organizations i mean there's a lot of a lot of things to think about i think even building a champion and they will help you answer all of these questions for you so they will tell you here's the right person and here's how you get through procurement here and here's how you answer security questions so i think finding the person for that specific organization that's going to like get the deal done and really navigate all of that is critical otherwise you're never going to get a deal done but they also need to be the right individual that has like some level of power authority otherwise they may be giving you guidance that just like fundamentally wrong you know if they're trying to be helpful so that's the easiest way to solve it if you have none of this experience at all is find someone that will get you there the other one would be like there there's often um budget approvals like anything over a hundred thousand might need to go up to a vp and so maybe you sell for nine you know 95k because then you can go in at the director level and you don't need to get up to a VP.

19:14At large companies, the further up you need to go,

19:17John Glasgow:the less likely you're going to go put in the ask. And so then whether it's asking your champion these questions, like how do we get it done? What is the thresholds? Because maybe you're willing to give a little bit on price just to make sure it gets done. But then there's also like big budgeting cycles. And so annual planning is often in the fall. And if you have a large piece of software purchasing, if it's a large budget, you need to actually likely get approved in the fall in the budget or you need to be replacing someone else's budget and so if you're like now in the AI era things have shifted a little bit and like budgets have gone out the window and everything's moving around but traditionally it was educating them on why they need some incremental piece of software that was out of budget in the middle of a budget cycle is incredibly hard to do and so I think these are the things that you know and I come from finance so it was part of the budgeting cycle I was setting the budgets that I like painfully learned on the other side and so now when we go back campfire is typically a budget replacement so we're we're clean there on like a clean swap on like a one-for-one but sometimes we are incremental and there's there's learnings there.

20:28I think there's something really interesting about sort of these these thresholds for budgets there's a solo founder that I know who sells to governments. And one thing that he's gotten really good at is understanding what it takes to get in the door. So you can just be just under the threshold that creates a lot more sort of scrutiny or a lot more friction. But then oftentimes the renewal process is actually much smoother, even if the renewal is at a higher rate. So I'm curious, you know, how you actually sort of suss that out, like in your experience in your field, how you suss that out when you're trying to find out what is that actual threshold is it through a champion is it through um through just actually having a like a sort of a blunt conversation of it what have you what have you learned over the years yeah government i think there's a little

21:13John Glasgow:bit of a cheat code if i recall because they have to like publicly share like rfps and like criteria and even i think a lot of the salaries are online so just just because trend level of transparency. Some are with nonprofits. There's a lot of like, they publish a lot of data online. So I think like, if you're not using that, particularly with Claude, you can ask Claude to go through these databases and have it answer questions for you. On the private sector side, I do think it still comes down to finding the champion because enterprises are not homogenous and you might need to like, but I think the one thing to be very careful of is if you are cross department or cross function or cross p &l anything that was ever cross p &l in a large organization which is like you sell to engineering and you sell to like a product leader and but they have a separate p &l and then who who's gonna because then you get into they almost operate like independent organizations and then getting them to like share the budget or one wants it more than the other they're always going to say like well you want this more than me why don't you take the whole number if you want it that bad and then you get stuck and then the deal breaks so narrowing stakeholders as narrow as possible even across continents or across geos they'll have a different pnl they'll have the europe engineering team and the america's engineering team is often rolling up to a separate pnl a separate leader so you want to avoid all that so start super narrow uh to your point about staying below thresholds and then build that champion to guide you through and um and then really just lining up those those budget cycles but you honestly also need like the stars to align you need a little bit of luck you know if somebody leaves then the whole you know your nine month uh i was working on a deal for nine months and it fell apart because somebody left and it was over and so stuff like that happens too so then And compressing the deal cycle can be incredibly valuable to increasing win rates.

23:21You have to know where you are in the deal cycle and where you are in their budget cycle. Because if you're trying to compress it but it doesn't fit with their window, it might not work. Yes. There's also something really interesting you said about who actually owns the budget or which organization if they're going to be splitting it. I've seen some companies in the past where they're sort of in the idea exploration phase. they get to a point where they have a prototype that's being used sort of for free inside of a company and then they find out that oh they love the product but actually it's this it's customer success team that's using it but the sales team controls the budget and they just realize this isn't actually a really good thing for them to actually be building because it's going to be really hard to sell uh into into the company if it's not actually being used by the people who have the actual like checkbook.

24:10I'd be really curious to hear a little bit about kind of what made you realize that it was the time personally or and or business wise to go and start Campfire because 15 years like I imagine you could have you could have gone a little bit less or you could have gone much longer you know working in this in these incredible companies and doing all this great work and and learning more about the industry. What was the thing that ultimately got you to say that was the right time for you to start a company yeah I went from a very

24:42John Glasgow:large organization in Adobe and then I went to a hundred employee series c company and I found that I really enjoyed it a lot more and I kind of like really missed like and it's like agency and ownership and accountability and you feel like the harder you work like you know it was a 90 employee company like I was more than one percent of the company and so my ability to have like impact you know more than one percent output so the harder I worked it was like directly you could see like directly see it into the business we're like yes a large company there is that but maybe maybe one fraction of a percent so I think I really enjoyed that and it brought me back to like gosh you know like how small do I want to go the old being a founder particularly a solo founder is the ultimate bet on yourself it's literally like i believe i can do something when the expected value is zero i can like take something here and go bet on myself and instead of just over one percent of the organization you're a hundred percent organization and do something um and and really just build something meaningful and so i think that was a moment for me of like gosh maybe I'll just go back all the way to the beginning and it came out of so I started to kind of have the entrepreneurial bug but then it came out of like really feeling the pain of the product of this category and I would get so I'm like deeply passionate about my work and I just get like so like so frustrated with the software and and with the the companies these legacy ERPs that I would just come home and just like you know tell tell my wife like man this category is like really broken it's like really painful and so started to think of like man this is kind of crazy but maybe I'll think about starting my own and so I applied to to Y Combinator of like here's this like deep pain and frustration I have and I think I can solve it and here's why um and the timing was literally terrible um my first daughter was two weeks old um and got into a white combinator with a two-week-old and talked to my wife and i'm like you know i was working at a big company at the time because we we the hunter employee company got acquired by a big company so i went from like adobe big to series c where i really enjoyed and we got acquired by big a public company bill.com and so it's like back in a big company i was like maybe i go all the way back to to founder and here's some like deep pain and white commentator is like ready to kind of kick things off you know with their 500k in funding and so that was the genesis of campfire that's super cool and at some point around that time you had a co-founder for campfire briefly yes so can you share a little bit about what that was like how you decided to work with somebody at that time and then we can talk a little bit about that and then we can of course discuss sort of what happened since yeah so i'm non-technical just on the finance you know hence the commentary around like finance background and so i had a technical co-founder and so we were building together and this is uh summer of 2023 and so obviously you know vibe coding's come a long way um but i think yeah it was definitely brief and it was an acknowledgement that like the the passion for this category was mine and like the pain was mine and so you know ended up going solo quite quickly and was really just like gosh I'm solo what do I do now and for the solo founders out there I mean just huge shout out because pre-product market fit you're wandering in the wilderness and I would come home and my wife would just be like like physically picking me up off the floor.

28:39John Glasgow:Um, because you don't, you don't know, like you're running as fast as you can in the wilderness and you're, you don't even know if you're running the right direction. And that's like the pre pre product market fit. And I had such high conviction in this idea, but it was probably a year and a half before it was, well, it was two full years before we found product market fit. And so there was a lot of like investors were saying like, Hey, are you sure this is a good idea or like why don't you think about something new and like everyone in my yc batch had either taken off or pivoted but me i was the only one that hadn't taken off that was still working on the same idea and you know i think it was like if i did not have this deep pain i think back to the shopping one like maybe i would have continued on as like poor as i was maybe i would have continued on if i really felt this pain in a deep passionate way for 15 years maybe i would have kind of continued on and built a pinterest but ultimately this was my ability to just power through and have that level of conviction that carried me through this running in the wilderness nowhere to go but ultimately like customers just started to respond and then it kind of found the trail in the wilderness and then just found a direction to run yeah i think i think ben silverman uh the the lore of that is he literally had like physical pin boards like when he was growing up he was like obsessed with like actually pinning things to physical boards and like there was a real there was a real connection to it and what you're doing now is obviously there's a real connection to the 15 years of experience you had after your first company um just to really quickly though talk about the the co-founder situation with with campfire even though it was brief i think it's really instructional because a lot of people have a similar situation they start off they think that they need a co-founder they end up working with someone and sometimes it's the co-founder situation just doesn't work out like there's actual acrimony sometimes you know it's just it's just not a fit or the timing's not right um you know I'm really curious this was like a nights and weekend sort of thing you were working on is you hadn't left your job you were still employed I believe when you uh when you were working on this idea before you got funding for it so what was sort of what was that like how did you decide to start working on somebody and start toying around with the ideas I think there are a lot of people maybe they're not if they're listening to this maybe they're not thinking about trying to find a technical co-founder but they are maybe working at a job and thinking about hey should I be like tooling around with like an idea that I'm really passionate about so what was that like what was going on then yeah well with with white combinator I'd applied with just an idea so I think and this is before the vibe coding so I think it was literally like here's this idea here's why I think it can be solved now and here's why I think I'm the person to do it and they're like you got in so we really started writing code like after it all started and you know I'd left and my commenter was like okay it starts tomorrow so you kind of quit and you quickly get started on on the company and incorporating and writing code I think if I was at the company today I as a non-technical or as a technical you know write the full app and really just like get a lot of feedback and I think maybe with the shopping app we asked a lot of friends for feedback and i think everybody says this is cool and i yes of course i would use it and then like they would not use it and so i think the like i was able to talk to some peers in finance but the biggest unlock was just cold outbound to people that i did not know at all and if they take the meeting like i vividly remember week one i'd quit and i did a cold up onto this guy and I'm like, Hey, like if you're open to like giving me some feedback on this idea, I was just showing them like Excel files at the time, because again, this is before like engineering is, is now.

32:35John Glasgow:And he's like, I'm happy to, he was working in corporate finance. He's like, I'm happy to meet with you for an hour a week and just help you give you feedback. He asked for nothing in exchange. He's like, this pain is so acute for me that I'm willing to give my like incredibly valuable time to just help you solve this pain that I have and just like people that you don't know at all being willing to just like commit like I didn't even ask he proactively offered this to me it was like wow I think there's something special here and so he spent the whole summer meeting with the guy weekly and he just every time every week we showed him a more advanced version and give some feedback and and then ended up being a paying customer and so I think the you know ai cold outbound or just doing some linkedin outbound um i think you if you're employed you do want to be careful about ip ownership my commentator is very critical of like hey let's have a clean break because then if you do take off there's like unclear ip so i would in the vibe coding era given everyone can have a side hustle be very careful about employment and ip ownership on your existing employment contract but ultimately if you're going to raise money from institutional capital they're going to expect you to be full-time most of the time or they will at least like the check is contingent on you leaving so then incorporate and then kind of like have a clean break on the on the ip and writing the code but you can ideate you can do some cold just you know outbound you can hear from some folks on if there's some value here and then if you fill a poll or you just it's a pain you personally feel there's no pull at all just go for it so it's it's 2023 you find a co-founder you apply with an idea uh you get in to yc um you start working on the actual like product building it out um you realize that maybe it's not working for the co-founder so that that ends up sort of being you end up being solo sort of after after like going all in uh after quitting your job and then you start to have the this outbound where you're messaging people and they're resonating with it and you know a great sign this one guy in particular says this is such a big problem for me i'm going to spend a lot of time with you on it um that's that's a really good sign do you you we talked earlier about right to win do you think that part of the reason that you got the reception that you did from that guy was because of your background and because of your ability to articulate because you had the background that you did.

35:13Like, I'm curious how you think right to win sort of fits in with early customer conversations or even pre-product sort of like prospective customer conversations.

35:24John Glasgow:Yeah, it was definitely both. So when I'm talking to them, it was always like, hey, I'm a fellow finance peer and I have this pain. If you have it too, like let's chat and they're always like yes like of course i have this pain and we'd hop on a call and we would talk about all of the whether it's board reporting or whether it's like you know for a fundraise or just like monthly you know arr reporting i was able to just go deep to their level and they're like a this guy gets it and b he's lived the pain i have and c he's just like passionate about solving it because many of our early customers were like look your product is so rudimentary it's not really usable but it just seems like you're going to figure it out you deeply understand the problem you know and and some of that was just going and meeting them in person but a lot of it was just like i am you and and i felt the pain with you and i've been a customer of these tools just like you so i lean into that very hard in the early days because the product was not where it needed to be for someone not like arm's length to be like oh my god this is way better.

36:29And I think the other one was a lot of the building was just for myself.

36:33John Glasgow:So I knew exactly where the like the three biggest pain points were and just narrowly focused on those. And then I guess the last thing I'll add is that comment I made about conviction. When everyone's telling you to move on, when even your investors are telling you to rethink this decision, when the whole YC batch has kind of moved on from their original idea, but you and otherwise they've all taken off that was really like that edge was like no I do need to keep going here which is the last thing I'll call out do you think that a lot of people who end up moving on from their ideas do you think that most of them as a result of they hadn't actually found something that was really sort of their right to win and that they had like a really meaningful insight in it if I is you know prior to working on solo founders I co-founded this thing called on deck and ODF and we help so many people start companies and find co-founders.

37:24And it always felt like if there was this process of kind of going from idea to idea to idea, eventually the idea that worked out of the maybe two, three, four, sometimes five or six ideas, it was always like this process of kind of actually figuring out who you are as a person and what actually you have as an insight that's unique to you or it gives you an advantage um and it feels like almost all all of the pivots uh could have been sort of short-circuited or sort of like gotten too faster had that sort of been the the thing that people were maybe a little bit more discerning about yeah one fascinating

38:03John Glasgow:insight i had from my batch was a lot of people tried to start companies entirely unrelated to what they do like in a prior life or even their like degree and then ended up landing on the idea that was related to what they did and so i think exactly as you're saying they like they almost run away from their own but then they like circle full back and then they had some unique insight that they end up discovering was actually like incredibly valuable that they can be the unique person to go solve that problem and so i think exactly as you're describing again no unique shopping insight for me. Someone maybe knows nothing about shopping and can still go build a Pinterest.

38:42John Glasgow:I'm not saying you can't, but for me, there was incredible value as I noted by having that. It also seems like there's some, there's some aspect of, you know, the more experience you have like in life or working on something consistently, you have an opportunity to maybe gain an edge. I think about there are obviously some incredible founders who kind of are outsiders to an industry and they break in, they learn as they go. And that's awesome. And I think that we'll continue to see more of that. But it also seems like there are so many great companies that are started by people who did spend, you know, 10, 15, 20 years in an industry before realizing that it was time to go and start maybe the first or second company that was really derived from this insight that they had.

39:26Do you have any thoughts about, you know, about companies that are sort of based off of maybe more than just like limited sort of early insights, maybe from an internship or, you know, being at a job for a year or two. I'm curious, like, what you've learned, what you've seen of other people who've maybe been like, you know, in an industry for a while before actually going and building their own company.

39:49John Glasgow:Yeah, in terms of like folks that knew nothing about a category, is that more of... Yeah, I mean, more like you spent 15 years. and and you not only uh the proof is in the fact that you message people they resonated super strongly with what you were saying um you had the ability to to know what a problem was that they would actually light up about and they'd say does this you know i experienced this problem is it is it something that you experience and a lot of them it seemed like when you reached out they said yes um i'm just curious what you what you've seen from other founder friends doesn't need to be solo founders of course um who who've maybe had longer experience in an industry that drove them to you know actually end up finding something similar to what you're doing with campfire where they have that in pretty early resonance you know before they they don't need to necessarily pivot to you know three or four different things before finding it yeah um i'm trying to think of an example because there was a lot of pivoting uh amongst my founder friends but there were some that like just went straight after a single thing and it was similar to me it was like hey i deeply felt this pain and so i think that's maybe the one the one call it i'll give which was like they had they lived it or they felt it before like maybe they had built an internal app at a larger company that solved this one problem and now they're going to go like solve it for the masses because they're able to do it in a unique or special way for another organization and outside how do i like commercialize this almost in like an academic kind of way where like ip gets developed within an organization you can like go ahead and commercialize yeah it's the only thing that comes to mind i think though that like um there are some founders that could probably go into any category and be successful so i you know i think to be a founder you need a little you need to be a little bit crazy and i always tell found because founders will call me and say should i pivot and you know i'll take calls in the car um and i tell them like don't listen to oh i didn't get funding or oh someone told me it's a bad idea like because you have to be crazy to be a founder don't listen to anybody but customers and and if the you know and if you haven't found the customer attraction yet why should you keep going and that's something only you can answer for yourself particularly as a solo founder so don't look for external validation because it often will never come i mean i love the brian chesky story where he was just like maniacally focused on you know airbnb and and it was just like a deep passion of his and every investor was saying no he was funding it with like cereal boxes he was selling and and i think because he spoke to our batch and shared the story and it was like wow you know this is this is a level of conviction it takes to be a founder because even if you are pivoting or not pivoting it is a roller coaster and maybe you know i talked to founders that say we had 100 million ar and we had to we had to like rebuild the business at 100 million or at a billion and particularly in the ai era so there's always going to be these like ups and downs pre-pm pre-product market fit post-product market fit um that to keep going you need to like um you need to just like find the inner um the inner um you the the one other big insight was my accommodator uh told us on the last day the number one reason you all will um if anyone here fails it's not because you run out of money it's because you burn out burn out's the number one reason for shutting down and so don't burn out and so taking care of yourself.