Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974 and studied at the Faculty of Radiophysics at Kyiv University. In 1999, together with fellow student Ruslan Dmytrakhovych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network, which at the time was one of the notable advertising aggregators of the Russian-language internet and the Ukrainian segment. In 2000, he took part in the UAportal project, where, with investor Oleksandr Soroka, the first social network on a Ukrainian portal, 'Tree of Friends', appeared.
Infostore, and Mail.ua
The photo hosting service Infostore.org began operating in 2003 and by 2004 was already making waves in industry media. The project was financed by investor Oleksandr Olshanskyi of Internet Invest Group. On 4 December 2008, police seized Infostore's servers and the project shut down. Many users and employees of the service later worked at other companies. For instance, was created by Ivan Savchenko, a native of Infostore, not Mas, although several publications named him as the author of.
Olshanskyi became a co-founder of Mail.ua, and in 2012 the email service was sold to Mail.ru for approximately half a million dollars. The deal was one of the first notable exits of a Ukrainian internet business into the Russian market. Mas participated in the project as a co-founder. In 2009, he co-organised the first iForum, an industry conference on internet business, together with Artur Orujaliiev and Serhii Korzh. Orujaliiev had previously owned AIN.UA.
Kyivstar and the innovation lab
In 2015, Mas joined Kyivstar as IT & Digital Advisor to the company's president, Petro Chernyshov. He then headed the operator's innovation laboratory, which he led for about three years. In April 2016, the company announced the telecom accelerator 'VDNG-TECh-Kyivstar'. By December of that year, four startups from the accelerator had gone into production.
Working at the corporation did not stop him from speaking publicly about the market. In 2018, he published a column about the crisis of 'blockchain dotcoms', and in 2020, when the iForum was postponed to autumn due to the coronavirus, he was among the organisers who announced the decision. On 31 July 2019, Mas left Kyivstar.
Craft Social Networks
Mas's last major project was Craft Social Networks, launched in August 2019. They were financed not by a venture fund but by donors: members of the syndicate contributed $100 each. In November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members. In August 2021, responding to a critical column 'Cringe of the Week', Mas said that 411 investors had put money into the project and that about $58,000 had been raised.
According to a relative, the illness lasted several recent months. During that period, Mas cancelled all virtual meetings, including those related to the project. The first to report his death was his brother Viktor Mas. That same day, social media saw a wave of obituaries from industry colleagues, former Kyivstar employees and iForum participants.
The editorial team of Detector Media, which published the news on 8 October 2021, listed the key milestones of his career: the sale of Mail.ua in 2012, the Ukrainian Banner Network, the closure of Infostore in 2008, three years at the head of Kyivstar's innovation laboratory, and Craft Social Networks, launched in 2019 with donors' money. These milestones remain the basis for any discussion of his legacy in the Ukrainian internet.
His brother Viktor Mas was the first to tell of his death on social media on 8 October 2021, and within hours the news was reprinted by Ukrainian publications.
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