Mas is a physicist by training. He has worked on the internet since the late 1990s, when together with his fellow student Ruslan Dmitrakovich he created a Ukrainian banner network. His wife is a programmer, and in the family they work together: ‘I come up with ideas, she supports and develops them.’ He calls himself a Zen Buddhist, and over the years, together with friends, he has created more than ten businesses. He is the author of ‘The Dao of the Businessman’, where the essence of the matter is expressed in the formula ‘Concentration, Energy and Freedom’.
Three Children and a Home Laboratory
His eldest daughter, Diana, at twenty works as an illustrator. She has illustrated four children’s books, and three of them are sold on Amazon. His son Mikhail, thirteen, draws, and his painting hung at an exhibition of children’s art at the Ukrainian embassy in Budapest. He runs a YouTube blog about Apple technology and at home is assembling an ‘Apple museum’ from old devices. His youngest daughter is two and a half; she loves cars, and her favourite thing is a screwdriver.
In the WoMo text the youngest daughter is called Elka. According to Forbes, the girl’s full name is Liza, she was born in 2014, and ‘Elka’ is a home name. There is another discrepancy: in a special MC project Mas is said to have four children, whereas Forbes counts three: Diana, Mikhail and Liza.
His approach to upbringing, he says, grew out of his own childhood. His parents ‘conducted experiments’, and he himself as a child slept on the balcony. From this experience grew the conviction he repeats in the interview:
‘Inside a child is an adult personality, even if he is two or three years old,’ says Mas.
Mistakes as a Working Method
He speaks calmly about failures. Mail.ua, he says, was built ‘by the rules’, but it lacked a spark, and the project had to be sold. Together with Alexander Olshansky, it was sold to Mail.ru in 2012 for approximately $0.5 million.
Mas sees a missed opportunity elsewhere. In the first Ukrainian social network, ‘Tree of Friends’, launched in 2000 on the UAportal, they did not think to make a message wall, which Facebook only arrived at five years later. Another project, the photo hosting service Infostore, closed after the events of December 2008: according to Forbes and AIN, on 4 December the police seized the servers.
He formulates his attitude to failures as a working principle: ‘There is nothing more useful for business than to make a mistake, learn lessons and then do it differently.’
After the Interview
In 2015 Mas became IT & Digital adviser to the president of Kyivstar, Peter Chernyshov, and later headed the company’s Innovation lab. In April 2016 the telecom accelerator ‘VDNKh-TECh-Kyivstar’ was announced, and in December of that year four of its startups went into production.
On 31 July 2019 Mas left Kyivstar. In August of that year ‘Craft Social Networks’ launched, which he created with a syndicate of investors at $100 each. The project was continued by Bogdan Gnatyuk, owner of Maralles and Chakloon, and eventually the project became Chakloon.
On 6 October 2021 Alexey Mas died. His brother Viktor was the first to report the death; his message appeared on 8 October.
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