About
Kelly Norton is a software engineer living in Surf City, North Carolina. He
holds degrees from Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
and from the MIT Media Lab where he studied under John Maeda. He has co-founded
a couple of companies. Most recently,
Fullstory, where he works as a Software
Engineer. He also co-founded Connexxia LLC in the early 2000's to help
universities effectively recruit high school seniors through online social
engagement. He spent six years at Google, working on Google Web Toolkit, Speed
Tracer, Google Chrome and other cool stuff. He worked on
Etsy's product search and he also spent nine
years building
MailChimp where he was a
Distinguished Software Engineer. He was a key member of the team that grew
Mailchimp to over $1B in revenue before it was acquired by
Intuit in 2021 for an astounding $12B.
Honestly, he really just likes to build things.
Links
Feel free to simply do the email thing if you'd like
kellegous@gmail.com. If your email
includes something you don't want the NSA to see, you can also use his
GPG Public Key to encrypt it first.
Work
MAILCHIMP
As of January 2025, Kelly has returned to
FullStory where he's trying to make
up for lost time and leverage all things ✨AI✨ to make every Fullstory
user an instant power user.
MAILCHIMP
As of December 2015, Kelly is part of the amazing team of talented misfits
at
MailChimp.
ETSY
For 2014 & 2015, Kelly was a software engineer on the Buyer Experience
team at
Etsy where he hacked on Search and
helped to make a world class engineering organization even more world
classy.
FULLSTORY
In early 2012, Kelly waved goodbye to a comfortable job to focus on
building business software that was powerful, yet beautiful and
well-crafted. In two years, the team (made mostly of former Googlers)
produced two such products,
Homebase.io and
FullStory. In 2015, FullStory
secured a series A round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers and Google Ventures and continues to make the world of analytics far
more human-centric.
GOOGLE
From 2006–2012, Kelly was a Software Engineer at Google where he
worked on a lot of different projects:
Google Web Toolkit
(2006–2010),
Speed Tracer
(2008–2010),
AdWords (2009),
Google Wave (2009 & 2010),
Dart (2011),
WebKit (2009 & 2012),
Google Chrome (2012) and a
number of other things he can't talk about.
Kelly started his career at Google working on Google Web Toolkit. When
he joined the team there were almost no internal applications using GWT.
Today it supports millions of lines of code and some of Google's most
critical properties. Through his work on GWT, Kelly got a good sense of
what it takes to implement web applications. In particular, he took
apart pretty much every shipping browser in the name of UI
responsiveness. He attempted to capture much of what he learned about
web performance in a project that started as a 20% project and ended
with the release of Speed Tracer. In 2009, he also won an OC Award (the
second highest award for innovation at Google) for his performance work
on AdWords.
In 2011, Kelly officially transitioned to work on Google Chrome where he
was involved in the initial public release of the Dart language. At the
forefront of the launch was
http://try.dartlang.org, a tool
he designed and implemented with a couple of awesome team members in a
very short time. After the Dart release, he has been focusing on
improving the web platform directly through work on WebKit where he is a
committer.
MIT MEDIA LAB
From 2004–2006, Kelly was a graduate student, researcher and
teaching assistant at the MIT Media Lab as a part of John Maeda's Physical
Language Workshop. Kelly's work focused on topics at the intersection of
engineering and visual design. His projects were generally of a
multi-disciplinary character and included areas such as information
visualization, collaborative creative tools and computational art.
CONNEXXIA
In 2000, Kelly co-founded Connexxia with friends Shawn Coyne and Peter
Flur. Connexxia's primary product, AdmissionsGenie, helped colleges and
universities more effectively recruit students by connecting them to real
people through the web. It showed consistent, good results and hosted the
admissions sites for a number of schools, including some big names like
Duke University, Emory University and Georgia Tech. Connexxia later
expanded its products to cover university alumni and some specialized
business recruiting. As a funny aside, Kelly was actually targeted by his
own recruiting tool when he neared graduation at MIT. In 2005, Connexxia
was acquired by Internet marketing firm James Tower. In 2010, James Tower
decided to focus the entire company on the higher education market and
rebranded themselves Blue Hue Education. AdmissionsGenie is still the name
of their premier product.
Personal
Kelly grew up in South Georgia but he speaks with almost no southern drawl
(except when he says “boiled peanuts”). He is married to
Stephanie and they have three kids: Rosario, Zoe and Ali. Kelly is stubborn
and likes to do things his way; the kids are stubborn and like to refuse to
do things, period. Kelly is also a bit of an endurance sports fanatic and
loves competing in triathlons (which he uses an excuse to add new stuff to
his bike).