Mas was an olympiad competitor. In tenth grade he took first place at the republican physics olympiad; in eleventh he came second. That was enough to enter the radiophysics faculty of Kyiv University named after Shevchenko in 1991 without exams. The faculty trained specialists at the intersection of physics, electronics and computing—that is, where future software developers studied in the early nineties.
At the department he took up programming and image recognition. From the same department came Yuriy Musatenko, head of Viewdle, “which was the first in the CIS to be bought by Google.” Viewdle worked on image and face recognition in video, a field close to what Mas became passionate about at the faculty. He learned HTML from fellow students. While playing table tennis he met Oleksandr Popov, author of the website “Dynamo Kyiv from Shurik,” dedicated to the Kyiv football club.
From the Department to the First Internet Project
The path after university was far from direct. In 1993–1995 Mas worked at NIIASS, where together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich he worked on the Tree system. Then followed Ukrainian Capital bank (1995–1997) and the National Bank of Ukraine, where from September 1997 to March 2000 he handled Visa card processing on HP-UX. Experience with large financial systems proved useful, but decisive was January 1999. Together with Dmitrakovich, Mas launched the Ukrainian Banner Network. The first version was written in Perl in three weeks; costs amounted to about $100. Already on March 7, 2000, he became director of “Ukrainian Portal” (UAPortal), which was created by Oleksandr Soroka, Oleksandr Koreshkov and Oleksandr Barabash of IP-Telecom.
What He Answered to the Question About University
In the AIN.UA rapid-fire survey, Mas admitted he would enroll again, and explained why:
“I would enroll again in the faculty to become a quantum physicist”
At the same time he noted that he sometimes regretted not going into journalism. That was his answer to the question the editors posed to heads of several IT companies: what would their choice be today.
Along with him, the survey included Dmytro Latansky (), Vitaliy Tyshchenko (ABBYY Ukraine), Andriy Kolodyuk, Yehor Anchyshkin (), Denys Dovhopoly, Mykola Paliyenko (), Oleksiy Ivankin (908.vc), Anatoliy Balyuk (DiaWest) and Yevhen Shevchenko (UaMaster). Among them were heads of online stores, marketplaces and software developers—that is, people who in 2015 were building the Ukrainian market of online services.
Projects That Followed the Faculty
In 2008 Mas was at the origins of Mail.ua. In the closed beta that started on August 22, 2008, he was listed as the project architect; the project was supported by the Internet Invest group with investments of over $1 million. In July and August 2012 Mail.ua passed to Mail.ru Group, as confirmed by the group’s vice president Anna Artamonova.
In parallel he worked on industry events. On April 1, 2009, the first Ukrainian Internet Professionals Forum was held, later becoming iForum, on the tenth anniversary of the Ukrainian Banner Network. Mas compiled the forum program and moderated the “Internet Business” track. The seventh iForum took place on April 16, 2015, and in 2016 Mas became an advisor to Kyivstar on digital technologies.
Oleksii Mas died in Kyiv on October 6, 2021, at the age of 47, after an illness. His death was reported on October 8 by his brother Viktor Mas.
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