Alexey Mas learned to play chess at about the age of six, when his father began teaching him. In his physics and mathematics class, he was considered roughly fifth in the unofficial ranking. Then came the Faculty of Radiophysics at Kyiv National University. From his third year, he worked at the Research Institute for Automation of Construction Systems, and in the late 1990s he served at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled payment processing.
A chess model of business
In the special project, Mas describes business using chess analogies. The public sector, he says, is like a game where everyone plays with pawns. In a corporation there are many queens fighting for influence. He compares running your own business to a different format of the game:
“Working for yourself is fast chess, where you need to instantly analyze the situation and make decisions.”
He has that experience. In 2015, he became IT&Digital advisor to Kyivstar President Peter Chernyshov, and later headed the company's Innovation lab. In April 2016, the VDNG-TECh-Kyivstar telecom accelerator was announced, and in December of that year four of its startups went into production. On July 31, 2019, Mas left Kyivstar.
iForum and previous launches
Mas names iForum, which he conceived in 2009, as his main public achievement. The first conference was prepared in three weeks instead of the usual six months, 1,280 tickets were sold, and the costs were recouped. Sergey Korzh was co-organizer of the forum, and Mas himself led the Internet Business track. Among his previous projects are, which appeared about ten years ago,, and an entrepreneurship program for schoolchildren created together with GoGlobal.
He has accumulated extensive experience in the industry, so the conversation about strategy in the special project touched not only on the market but also on personal decisions. Mas talks about risks and about how to make decisions without complete information, and the chess metaphors in the interview serve as a working language for this.
'Chess of Kindness' and 'Craft Social Networks'
The Go school appeared about six years ago at Kyiv's Tea Club. Five months before the interview, the 'Chess of Kindness' project had been running: lessons in orphanages in twelve cities, more than three hundred children taught, and monthly tournaments. Mas is also preparing a book, 'The Zen of an Innovator'.
A separate thread of the interview is devoted to 'Craft Social Networks'. The project was launched in August 2019, and participation in the syndicate was offered for one hundred dollars. In November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members, and the special project cites the figure of 315 investors, each of whom contributed $100. Mas does not hide his ambitions and says he made a bet with his elder son: “I bet my elder son that in three years we will reach a billion-dollar valuation.”
The special project was published on MC.today in partnership with the broker Freedom Finance Ukraine. In it, Mas talks about chess as a model of thinking, about working in a corporation and about his own startups, as well as about the projects he ran in parallel with his main business.
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