Brother Viktor Mas reported on Facebook that Alexey died on October 6, adding that he had been ill recently. The post appeared on October 8, and by evening Novyny.live had gathered reactions from colleagues. "You left too soon...", wrote Viktor. Journalist Sergey Kotyra compared Mas to Arkady Nosik: "Oleksii Mas has passed away. He was a great man. Like Nosik, only Ukrainian." Timur Vorona wrote: "I can't believe it, but Alexey is no longer with us."
Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974, studied at physics and mathematics school No. 145, then at the radio physics faculty of Kyiv State University. From 1993 to 1997 he worked at NIIASS and at Ukrainsky Kapital bank, and from September 1997 to March 2000 he was a leading specialist at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled payment processing. That experience later served him in the internet business: he always built technical projects around the flow of users and money.
Banners, portals and the first social networks
In early 1999, together with fellow student Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he founded the Ukrainian Banner Network. In 2000, Mas launched UAportal with investor Alexander Soroka, and the portal featured "Tree of Friends", the first Ukrainian-language social network. In 2007, UAportal was sold to the holding. At that time his portfolio also included the portals and.
His most famous project with photo hosting was Infostore. It was launched in 2003–2004, and on December 4, 2008, the police seized its servers and the project closed. Former Infostore employee Ivan Savchenko later created, which is why Novyny.live's headline calling Mas "the creator of " is inaccurate. The error was repeated in other obituaries, but the project was invented by another person.
Mas conceived and organized the iForum conference together with Sergey Korzh and Alexander Olshansky, chairman of the organizing committee. The first iForum took place in 2009. Together with Olshansky, he also participated in the creation of Mail.ua, which was sold to Mail.ru in 2012. Obituaries separately noted that Mas had long been involved in startups and venture deals, not just his own websites.
Kyivstar and "Craft Social Networks"
In 2015, Mas became IT & Digital advisor to Kyivstar president Peter Chernyshov. Later he headed the company's innovation lab, which launched startups and accelerators. In 2016, the company announced the telecom accelerator "VDNG-TECh-Kyivstar", and in December of that year four of its startups went into production. In July 2019, Mas left the company.
In August 2019, he launched "Craft Social Networks", a syndicate project that could be joined for $100. By November 2019, about 280 people had joined the syndicate. The iForum-2020 conference was postponed to the autumn due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Mas continued to run the project. In response to criticism in August 2021, he wrote in the bureau and in his column about 411 investors and approximately $58,000 raised for development.
What happened to the project
After Mas's death, the syndicate continued to be led by Bohdan Hnatiuk, owner of Maralles and Chakloon. In November 2021, the syndicate was already speaking of "more than 400" participants. The project was at the center of a dispute: one side declared it closed, while Hnatiuk continued work on it. On November 30, 2021, the project was renamed Craf.
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