Oleksii Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974. He graduated from physics and mathematics school No. 145 and from the radiophysics faculty of the local university. From 1993 to 1997 he worked at NIIASS, then at Ukrainsky Kapital bank, and from September 1997 to March 2000 he was a leading specialist at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he worked on payment processing. In January 1999, together with his classmate Ruslan Dmytrakovych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network, UBS. Dmytrakovych became its co-founder and sold his stake in 2006.
In 2000, the portal UAportal, whose investor was Oleksandr Soroka, launched Derevo Druzei, the first social network on a Ukrainian portal. In 2007, the holding bought UAportal. Thus Mas began with advertising and portals, and returned to social networks almost twenty years later.
Infostore and Mail.ua
Mas developed the file-sharing service Infostore.org together with investor Oleksandr Olshanskyi. The project closed in 2008: on 4 December the police seized its servers. Ivan Savchenko, an Infostore alumnus, later created. A number of publications mistakenly called Mas the creator of, but the service was created by Savchenko.
With Olshanskyi, Mas also created the email service Mail.ua. In 2012 it was sold to Mail.ru for approximately $0.5 million. His conference work followed the same pattern: in 2009 he became co-organizer of the first iForum together with Serhii Korzh. Olshanskyi was chairman of the organizing committee, and Artur Orudzhaliev, former owner of AIN.UA, was a co-founder of the conference.
Kyivstar and innovation
In 2015 Mas became IT & Digital adviser to Kyivstar president Petro Chernyshov. Later he headed the company's Innovation Lab. On 20 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.
His public appearances were not always calm. In May 2017, a post in which Mas compared the blocking of VKontakte to deportation caused a scandal. At the end of that same month, a fake 'business-forum 2017' appeared with a copy of the iForum website. It was organized by the PR agency PRavik, owned by Yuliia Pravyk. In March 2020, iForum-2020 was postponed to the autumn because of COVID-19.
'Craft social networks'
In August 2019, Mas launched the project 'Craft Social Networks' and a syndicate of investors with contributions of $100 each. By November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members. In August 2021, responding to the 'Cringe of the Week' column, he reported 411 investors and a total of about $58,000. Mas himself called the project his main work of recent years, and the same idea of people communicating on the internet led him from social networks to craft products.
His brother Viktor wrote on Facebook:
'You left this life too soon...'
Mas died on 6 October 2021, and on 8 October the media reported his death, followed by a wave of obituaries. On 11 and 12 October, LIGA and Forbes published retrospectives of his career. On 29 November 2021, Larysa Mas, who described herself as his former wife, announced the closure of the project. Bohdan Hnatiuk continued to run the syndicate, which by then numbered more than 400 people. On 30 November the project was renamed Craf.
Today the project operates under the name Chakloon; its owner is Bohdan Hnatiuk, who also owns Maralles magazine. On 6 October 2022, republished Oleksii Mas's last interview to mark the anniversary of his death.
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