Prerna Ramachandra ’14 Integrates Technology and Storytelling at New Yahoo Creators

Prerna Ramachandra ’14 grew up in New Delhi, India, just as the internet was taking off. She went online to find communities that shared her interests — such as Jane Austen and Harry Potter fandoms. Ramachandra has always been drawn to technology and storytelling, and she has forged a career that makes space for both.

While she was an undergraduate majoring in computer science, Ramachandra cofounded Princeton Women in Computer Science to encourage and support women interested in the field. Through its various initiatives, she met alumni who prioritized flexibility in their own careers. “It gave me confidence to make those career pivots because I know people who have done it,” she says. 

Ramachandra also took plenty of classes at Princeton in the humanities and creative writing. She took Screenwriting for a Global Audience, taught by screenwriter Christina Lazaridi ’92, about how to write stories that leverage modern technology. “I still have notes from that class that I accessed last year when I started making films professionally, and these things are still really valid,” she says.

After graduating, Ramachandra worked as a product manager at Intuit. She realized that she wasn’t solely interested in technology, but in how technology impacts people. Following the 2016 election, Ramachandra moved to Washington, D.C., to work for NGP VAN, a data tech company providing software for democratic campaigns. In 2018 she joined TheWashington Post, where she worked on reader experience. Around this time, online disinformation was incipient and social media was transforming people’s relationship with the news. “I was sitting in the middle of a lot of change,” Ramachandra says.

Her new role as principal product manager of Yahoo’s new lifestyle content platform, Yahoo Creators, merges her dual interests. “My focus is thinking about ways in which we can distill this content in the Wild West of the internet and better organize it for people,” she says.

Yahoo Creators, which launched last year, allows approved independent writers to publish their content. Ramachandra sees this as an answer to what the modern reader is looking for. “When I read a piece of content from a creator, I know it comes from a specific person because it has a specific voice,” she says, as opposed to legacy media which tends to require a uniform voice.

For the past year and a half, Ramachandra has also pursued her passion for storytelling through writing fiction and making short films, which have premiered at the Big Apple and New York International Women film festivals, among others. “I like writing stories not about women who want to get empowered but empowered women who are still struggling to navigate a society that doesn’t quite know what to do with us,” she says.

Ramachandra hopes current students can find inspiration like she did to embrace the many possible forms their career paths can take. “Listen to other people’s stories,” she says. “It will give you the confidence to figure out what your own is.”