We recently connected with Yana Tornoe and have shared our conversation below.

Yana, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

As a product manager at a SaaS company, I was constantly facing the same issue—an overwhelming silo between the product development team and the commercial teams. We all had a common goal: build great products and serve our customers well. But no matter how aligned we tried to be, there was always this massive barrier when it came to information sharing. The product team was busy building, and the sales and support teams were often left in the dark about new features or product updates. The result? A lot of redundant questions, confusion, and wasted time.

The situation hit home one day when I found myself answering the same question from different people across the company—again and again. I had spent time explaining the same thing over Slack, on Zoom, and in email threads. And it wasn’t just me; everyone was doing it. Questions would get buried in Slack channels, wikis would go out of date, and the knowledge was scattered across multiple tools like Notion and Confluence. When you needed something, it was hard to find, and even harder to know if it was still relevant.

This frustration wasn’t unique to me. Kasper, one of my co-founders, had a similar experience while working at LEGO. He witnessed firsthand the inefficiencies of knowledge management in large companies. SharePoint was full of outdated information, and trying to find anything meant asking three different people just to figure out where the right file was. Documentation was an afterthought, and people were always asking the same questions again and again, especially in chat.

It was at that moment we realized something—this wasn’t just a small problem in one company. This was a universal challenge, especially for fast-growing teams. Everyone had a common pain: the constant flow of questions that could easily be answered if the right information was readily accessible. The need for a tool that could break down these information silos and help people get answers in the context of their workflow was massive.

So, we decided to do something about it.

Yana, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Yana Tornoe, co-founder of Question Base, a company that’s transforming how teams manage and access knowledge. After scaling our previous startup, Swipes, to over a million users, we realized that fast-growing teams often struggle to capture and organize the expertise shared in real-time communication tools like Slack. That insight led us to build Question Base—a tool that captures and structures this knowledge, making it easily searchable and accessible across the team’s workflow.

At Question Base, we help teams quickly find accurate, up-to-date answers directly in Slack, cutting down on time spent searching for information and improving productivity. What sets us apart is our AI-driven approach to transforming unstructured chat data into structured, actionable knowledge, which is something traditional knowledge management systems don’t fully offer.

We’re most proud of how much we’ve been able to help teams save time and collaborate more effectively.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

A key story that highlights my resilience comes from my experience with Swipes, the productivity tool we built several years ago. As we branched out from B2C to B2B, we started developing an innovative workspace tool that aimed to radically improve team collaboration – it was 2015-2019. A smart interconnected workspace between all your systems of record. However, the timing was off and we didn’t manage to execute the vision sufficiently well.

Despite the setbacks, we didn’t give up. We pivoted 13 times and built version after version, we even self-funded the company through gigs once our investor funding dried out. We ran it for 6 years trying to execute our vision. While Swipes didn’t achieve the scale we hoped for, the experience was foundational. It taught me the importance of resilience in the face of failure—how to adapt, learn, and stay focused on the bigger picture. That mindset has been crucial in building Question Base and for our mindset to always learn and grow.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Stefan and I have been best friends since high school 17 years ago. I met Kasper 12 years ago as my partner in life. And we all shared curiosity for building startups and products. Together we ran Swipes for 6 years. We lived all together with our team in a 2 bedroom apartment in Palo Alto for 2 years. We spent our mid-20s having a blast and crafting products we believed in.
After closing Swipes, we kept on working together as consultants for companies like Typeform, Vivino & LEGO.
And now we co-founded Question Base together and onto this new exciting journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.questionbase.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanatornoe/

Image Credits

@Question Base @Stefan Vladimirov