Oleksii Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974 and attended physics and mathematics school No. 145, then studied at the radio physics faculty of Shevchenko University. His first working years were spent at the Research Institute of Automated Systems in Construction and at Ukrainsky Kapital bank. From 1997 to 2000, he worked at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled payment processing. It was then, according to his own words from an autobiography, that the guiding principle of his life emerged, one he would later repeat in interviews.
“From then on I worked only for myself – serving people.”
The first notable internet project was the Ukrainian Banner Network, which Mas launched in January 1999 with his university classmate Ruslan Dmitrakovich. In 2000, UAportal appeared, with Alexander Soroka as investor, and the portal launched “Tree of Friends,” the first social network in Ukrainian. Later, Dmitrakovich sold his stake in the banner network, and in 2007 UAportal was sold to the holding.
Infostore and the first blow to the project
In 2003–2004, Mas launched Infostore, a photo hosting service that quickly became one of the most prominent services in the Ukrainian segment of the web. The project’s investor was Alexander Olshansky of Internet Invest Group. According to Forbes and AIN, on December 4, 2008, police seized Infostore’s servers, and the project closed. is sometimes attributed to Mas, but as Forbes reported, that service was created by Ivan Savchenko, a native of Infostore.
Mas’s infrastructure skills proved useful in his next projects as well. In 2009, the first iForum took place, one of the most famous conferences of the Ukrainian internet business. Mas was its co-organizer and led the “Internet Business” track. Along with him, the organization was handled by Sergey Korzh and Artur Orudzhaliev, co-founder of iForum and former owner of AIN.UA. The chairman of the organizing committee was Olshansky. In March 2020, the organizers announced the postponement of iForum-2020 to the autumn due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mail.ua, which Mas created with Olshansky, was sold to Mail.ru in 2012 for approximately $0.5 million. The sum is generally cited consistently in retrospectives and notes, although one publication gave the deal date as 2009.
Kyivstar and Craft Networks
In 2013, Mas participated in the Digicode and Nebo15 projects, and from 2015 he worked at Kyivstar. He first served as IT&Digital advisor to the company’s president, Peter Chernyshov, then headed the Innovation lab. In 2016, the company launched the telecom accelerator “VDNH-TECh-Kyivstar.” By December 2016, four startups from the accelerator had gone into production. Mas left Kyivstar on July 31, 2019.
As early as August 2019, he started the Craft Networks project and a syndicate that one could join for $100. In November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members. In August 2021, responding to criticism, Mas wrote of 411 investors and a sum of about $58,000. The project remained one of his most public initiatives until the very end.
Mas left three children: daughter Diana, son Mikhail, and daughter Liza. His brother Viktor was the first to report the death, and Mas himself said repeatedly in interviews that his task on the internet was to serve people, not to build himself a monument. The Craft Networks project was continued by Bohdan Hnatiuk, owner of Maralles and Chakloon, and eventually the project became Chakloon.
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