Alexey Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974 and studied at the Faculty of Radiophysics at Kyiv State University. His path on the internet began in the late nineties. In January 1999, together with his classmate Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he co-founded the Ukrainian Banner Network. In 2000, he launched 'Tree of Friends,' the first social network on the Ukrainian portal, and in 2003 and 2004 he worked on Infostore.org, a photo hosting service, with investor Alexander Olshansky.
Infostore did not last long. On December 4, 2008, the police seized the project's servers, and it shut down. Former project employee Ivan Savchenko later created. Contrary to the widespread version, its creator was not Mas, as Forbes wrote, but Savchenko. During those years, Mas himself was one of the organizers of the iForum conference: the first forum took place in 2009, and Mas co-organized it and moderated the 'Internet Business' track.
Mail.ua and Kyivstar
In 2012, Mail.ua, created together with Olshansky, was sold to Mail.ru for approximately $0.5 million, along with the email service's users. Among his other projects in 2013 are Digicode and Nebo15. In 2015, Mas joined Kyivstar as IT&Digital Advisor to the company's president, Peter Chernyshov. Later he headed the operator's innovation lab and worked there for three years.
Under Mas's leadership, Kyivstar expanded its work with startups. On April 20, 2016, the company announced the telecom accelerator 'VDNH-TECh-Kyivstar,' and in December of that year four of its startups went 'into production.' Mas's prominence extended beyond corporate projects. In May 2017, his post comparing the blocking of VKontakte to deportation caused a scandal. The author of the text was Mas himself, not the person to whom the ban was applied. In July 2019, he left Kyivstar.
'Craft Social Networks'
In August 2019, Mas launched 'Craft Social Networks,' which described as 'something between Telegram and Facebook.' The project was financed by small investors who contributed $100 each as part of a syndicate. In the text, the number of participants is given as 'more than 100,' but the dynamics according to other publications look different. In November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members; in a special project by MC, 315 were mentioned; and in August 2021, in response to criticism, Mas cited 411 investors and about $58,000 in raised funds.
Work on the project proceeded against the backdrop of changes in the industry. In March 2020, the organizers postponed iForum-2020 to the autumn due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mas remained one of the prominent voices of Ukrainian internet business and continued to lead public discussions about the market.
Main Goal
In August 2021, Mas gave an interview to in which he named 'changing the internet' as the main goal of his work. This phrase became one of his last public statements about why he was working on his own social network.
'Change the internet'
Mas leaves behind three children. He was married from 1995, and in 2021 his ex-wife Larisa referred to herself as his former spouse. His brother Viktor was the first to report the death, and on October 8, the day of 's publication, information about the illness appeared on Mas's Facebook page. That same day, a wave of obituaries began to spread in the media.
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