The questionnaire turned out lively, and that is clear from the first lines. The questions covered age, education, favourite websites and a motto, and Mas’s answers stood sharply apart from the dry biographies of his fellow jurors. He did not hide behind job titles but wrote about himself the way people write in personal notes.
Mas was born in 1974 and graduated from Kyiv State University as a radio physicist. He entered university in 1991 without exams, after physics olympiads. His professional path began in banking: from 1995 to 1997 he worked at Ukrainsky Kapital bank, and from September 1997 to March 2000 he served at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled Visa processing on HP-UX.
In the questionnaire he also mentioned his family: married, with a five-year-old daughter. His interests were listed as: ‘literature (I write), cars (I repair), psychology (I train), karate’. The combination well described a man who at twenty-seven was already co-owner of one of Ukraine’s first banner networks and running a major portal.
Websites, the internet and free time
Mas most often visited,,, and. In the early 2000s AltaVista and Yahoo were among the world’s main search and directory sites, conceptcarz was devoted to concept cars, and the two.ru addresses showed that his list also included Russian resources. The list itself was short but varied: search, directory, cars and Russian-language sites.
He went online, by his own account, for three things: news, meeting interesting people and a way to express individuality. Asked about free time, he answered briefly and with irony: ‘I am absolutely free at any time.’
Motto and fellow jurors
The main line of the questionnaire was the motto Mas formulated as follows:
‘Better to live well and briefly than badly and long’
Alongside him on the Sun Awards 2001 jury were Sergei Rachinsky, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Internet UA, aged 41; Yan Kochi, director of, aged 33; and Valery Pekar, president of Euroindex Ltd., aged 35. The jury also included Mikhail Dudnik, general director of Silverpoint; Sergei Denisenko of ; and Anna, commercial director of UkrNet LLC, whose surname is illegible in the questionnaire. Among those whose age was given, Mas was the youngest.
The results of the competition were announced on 19 November 2001, five weeks after the questionnaires were published. The questionnaire itself matters because it shows what the Ukrainian internet business looked like from the inside: it was run by people with physics degrees, banking experience and a love of cars and search engines.
What happened next
In January 1999, Mas and Ruslan Dmitrakovich launched the Ukrainian Banner Network. The network was written in Perl in three weeks and cost about $100. A year later, on 7 March 2000, Mas became director of the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal), whose co-founders were Alexander Soroka, Alexander Koreshkov and Alexander Barabash of IP-Telecom.
In 2008 he worked as architect of the Mail.ua email service. In August that year the service was in closed beta, and Internet Invest Group put more than $1 million into the project. In 2012 Mail.ua passed to Mail.ru Group; the purchase was confirmed by Anna Artamonova, vice-president of Mail.Ru Group.
From 1 April 2009, when the first Ukrainian Internet Professionals Forum was held to mark the tenth anniversary of UBN, Mas was one of the organisers of the events that later became iForum. The first forum had 1,280 participants. In 2016 he became an adviser to Kyivstar on digital technologies, after three years running the operator’s innovation lab. As wrote, in 2019 he launched ‘craft networks’ with donors’ money. The project was later continued by Bogdan Gnatyuk and eventually became Chakloon.
Mas died in Kyiv on 6 October 2021, aged 47, after an illness. On 8 October his brother Viktor Mas announced it.
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