Mas was born in 1974 in Kyiv and graduated from the Faculty of Radiophysics at Kyiv University. From 1993 to 1997, he worked at the Research Institute of Applied Information Technologies and the bank Ukrainsky Kapital, 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 Dmitrakovich, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network, which became one of the first advertising tools of the Ukrainian internet.
In 2000, Mas, together with investor Alexander Soroka, created UAportal and Derevo Druzei, the first social network on the Ukrainian portal. In 2003 or 2004, according to various sources, Infostore.org appeared, a photo hosting service in which Alexander Olshansky was an investor. This is the story behind the main confusion in the obituary.
Infostore, and the errors in the obituary
In the headline, the publication called Mas the creator of the legendary, a file-sharing service that accepted files up to 50 gigabytes and, according to, closed at the end of December 2016. According to Forbes, the author of is a different person: the project was created by Ivan Savchenko, a native of Infostore. Mas had nothing to do with its creation.
The error also concerned the closing date of Infostore. cited 2009, whereas the photo hosting service's servers were seized on December 4, 2008, and the project closed then. This date is confirmed by Forbes and AIN. The editorial team published the headline with an update at 21:05, but the corrected version did not eliminate the errors about the authorship of.
Creator of legendary Oleksii Mas has died
The same wrote that after Infostore, Mas allegedly launched, and later his team created. These claims are not confirmed by primary sources, and subsequent publications about Mas do not use this authorship.
Kyivstar, iForum and Craft Social Networks
Mas's most notable endeavor was organizing iForum: in 2009, he became a co-organizer of the first forum, and later he led the Internet Business track. In 2007, UAportal, which he owned, was sold to the holding. Thus, itself had business ties with Mas long before the obituary.
In 2012, Mail.ua, created together with Alexander Olshansky, was sold to Mail.ru for approximately $0.5 million. called Mas its creator but did not specify the co-investor's role. In 2013, Mas participated in the Digicode and Nebo15 projects, and in 2015 he joined Kyivstar as an advisor to the company's president Peter Chernyshov on IT and digital areas. Later he headed the telecom operator's Innovation lab.
In 2019, he left Kyivstar, with his last day at the company being July 31. In August of that year, he launched the Craft Social Networks project and a syndicate that could be joined for $100. In November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members. In August 2021, Mas wrote that there were already 411 investors and the total raised was about $58,000. According to him, the project had released a prototype, which in his publications appeared under number 77.
The last major public event associated with Mas was a text about his work on iForum, which was noted by industry publications. In 2020, the forum was moved from spring to autumn due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That same year, Mas authored one of the most-read texts about the Craft Social Networks project.
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