According to his son, Mas's heart stopped on 6 October. He was 47. His family posted about his death on his Facebook page on 8 October and promised to announce funeral details later. The Styler piece, prepared by Volodymyr Kostyrin, appeared the same day under the headline 'Oleksii Mas, the "godfather" of Ukrainian IT, has died.' The publication recalled the projects that usually stay behind the scenes and wove them into a single biography.
Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974, attended physics and mathematics school No. 145, and later graduated from the radio physics faculty of Kyiv University. From 1993 to 1997 he worked at NIIASS and at Ukrainsky Kapital bank, and from September 1997 to March 2000 he was a leading specialist at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled payment processing. In January 1999, together with his classmate Ruslan Dmytrakovych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network, which became one of the first advertising networks on the Ukrainian market.
Portals, photo hosting and the first social networks
In 2000, Mas worked on UAportal, a portal backed by investor Aleksandr Soroka, as well as on Derevo Druzei (Tree of Friends), the first social network on a Ukrainian portal. In 2003–2004 he was at the origins of Infostore, a photo hosting service that soon became a prominent Russian-language internet project in Ukraine. The project came to an abrupt end on 4 December 2008: police seized the servers and Infostore shut down. By then UAportal had already been sold to the holding, which Forbes reported in 2007.
Styler also listed lesser-known works: the Visual Letter visual email program and offline maps of London, Barcelona and Paris for iPhone and iPad. The list also included Mail.ua, an email service Mas created with Aleksandr Olshansky. In 2012, Mail.ua was sold to Mail.ru for about $0.5 million, according to Forbes and LIGA. His biography also includes the Ukrainian Banner Network, Infostore, the iForum conference, where he was a co-organizer, and work as an adviser to the president of Kyivstar.
There is an error in this list that needs correcting. Styler called Mas the creator of the file-sharing service, but according to Forbes it was invented by Ivan Savchenko, a former Infostore man. The obituary also fastened this story to Mas, although he had nothing to do with it.
Kyivstar and the syndicate
The first iForum took place in 2009, and since then the conference has become the main venue for Ukrainian internet business. In 2015, Mas joined Kyivstar as IT & Digital adviser to president Petr Chernyshov, and later headed the company's Innovation Lab. In 2016, the company announced the VDNKh-TECh-Kyivstar telecom accelerator, in which Mas participated as program director. In December of that year, four startups from the accelerator went into production. On 31 July 2019, Mas left Kyivstar.
His main endeavor in recent years was Craft Social Networks. The project launched in August 2019, and investors were offered entry into a syndicate with a minimum contribution of $100. In November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members; in an MC special project their number grew to 315, and by August 2021 there were 411 investors. According to Mas, by then about $58,000 had been invested in the project, and the prototype was called 77. The iForum-2020 conference was postponed to the autumn because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the organizers announced on 10 March 2020.
Mas remained a prominent figure in public debates. Styler quoted his 2016 interview, in which he said he wanted to 'change the country' through his own business, and was convinced that pressure on entrepreneurs remained the same:
'the pressure on IT people is the same as it always was'
His family promised to announce funeral details later.
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