Code PaLOUsa Speaker Interview Series — Richard Teachout

Back in mid-2020 — right in the middle of the everything-remote era — I sat down with the Code PaLOUsa team for their speaker interview series. I was CTO for El Toro at the time, and the conversation covered the thing people usually want to know first: how online advertising actually works, the cookie-free, IP-based side of it that El Toro built its whole business on.

The El Toro Angle

Most people have a vague sense that online ads follow them around. The interview digs into the machinery underneath: how targeting works, what it means to do it without cookies, and why IP-based targeting is a fundamentally different approach to reaching the right person. It's the kind of stuff that sounds dense until someone who's actually built it walks you through it — and then it clicks.

Leadership, and the Haunted House

It wasn't all ad tech. The conversation got into leadership — how you run engineering teams, how you make the call between building and buying, how you keep people moving the same direction — and somewhere in there, the haunted house came up. I ran a very popular haunted house in Louisville for years, and it turns out running a haunted attraction and running a tech organization share more than you'd think: both are about recruiting people who believe in the mission, building something under a hard deadline, and making sure the show goes on.

The Talk That Year

That same year I gave a talk at Code PaLOUsa called "Existential Flexibility: Short term sacrifices for long term success" — about the tradeoffs that look painful in the quarter but compound over the years. The register link from back then is long gone, but the interview is still up, and it's a good snapshot of where my head was at: how the sausage gets made in online advertising, what leading through it looks like, and why you should never underestimate a guy who builds haunted houses.

Think this argument fits your event? Tell me about the room — the calendar is selective.