Welcome to my website! Reach me at: GarenCheckley@gmail.com • LinkedIn • Twitter • GitHub
Personally: I'm an energy/electricity nerd that follows national electric grid policy & local rate-design & ratemaking cases affecting California and PG&E territory. I also experiment with AI tools and APIs, for research & building/vibe-coding. Additionally, I volunteer on Sierra Club regional executive committees to help make local climate-solutions (from electrification to transportation to housing) easier, faster, & cheaper to deploy.
A few fun things I've worked on personally:
- A cursor-vibcoded experimental system that makes AI-researched GenAI podcasts about any topic, niche or mainstream: Github
- A (successful!) campaign to simplify window replacement rules in San Francisco, to make it easier and cheaper for people to upgrade to efficient windows: my SF Chronicle opinion piece, SF Examiner solution piece
- A (vibecoded)simple personal transit monitor webapp to see when the bus is coming at your local stop(s) in San Francisco. Useful to help leave work/home to avoid waiting too long. Github
- An audit of electric home trends (Climate Capital)
- A webapp to help me learn Hindi as I'm watching Hindi-language YouTube videos: demo video (no longer live)
Professionally: I'm a Group Product Manager on Google Pay products. My specialty is new products for emerging markets like Brazil and India. Previously I led UX teams, was a prototype engineer, and worked in ops.
A few fun things I've worked on professionally:
- Launched Pix payments in Google Wallet in Brazil
- Launched Pix via NFC in Google Wallet, in close partnership with Brazil's Central Bank and bank partners
- An effort to improve Google products for women in emerging markets (whitepaper), including “Privacy is not for me, it’s for those rich women” (SOUPS 2018) leading to product features across Gogole
- Led the Files by Google app from 200M to 400M monthly users
- Launched YouTube Go, a version of YouTube for low end internet-constrained devices