Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974 and graduated from the radiophysics faculty of the local university. In the 1990s he worked at the Research Institute of Applied Information Technologies, then at Ukrainian Capital bank. From September 1997 to March 2000, Mas was a leading specialist at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled payment processing. That experience later served him well in internet projects built on payment services and large user bases.
In January 1999, together with classmate Ruslan Dmytrakhovych, he founded the Ukrainian Banner Network (UBS), one of the first advertising networks on the Ukrainian market. In 2000, UAportal appeared with investor Oleksandr Soroka. It launched "Tree of Friends," the first social network on a Ukrainian portal. In 2006, Dmytrakhovych sold his stake in UBS, and in 2007 UAportal was sold to the holding.
Mail.ua, Infostore and the story
Together with investor Oleksandr Olshanskyi, Mas created the Mail.ua email service. According to Forbes, in 2012 it was sold to Mail.ru for about $0.5 million. Earlier, in 2003 according to Forbes—or in May 2004 according to Vektor and 24 Kanal—the photo hosting site Infostore.org was launched. The project ran on funding from the same Olshanskyi, but in December 2008 the police seized the servers, and the site shut down.
What is remembered most strongly in the history of the Ukrainian internet, then, is not only the successes but also the confusion over authorship. A number of publications named Mas the creator of the file-sharing service. As Forbes wrote, it was created by Ivan Savchenko, a native of Infostore. Headlines in OBOZ and Novyny.live calling him the "creator of " were mistaken.
iForum and Kyivstar
In 2009, the first iForum, one of the country's main industry conferences, was held in Kyiv. Mas became its co-organizer and moderated the "Internet Business" track. The forum's co-organizers also included Artur Orudzhaliev and Serhii Korzh, while Oleksandr Olshanskyi served as chairman of the organizing committee.
In 2015, Mas joined Kyivstar as IT&Digital advisor to company president Petro Chernyshov. Later he headed the Innovation Lab. In April 2016, the company announced the launch of the telecom accelerator "VDNH-TECh-Kyivstar." In December of that year, four startups from the accelerator were brought to production. In total, Mas worked at Kyivstar for about three years at the head of the lab, and on July 31, 2019, he left the company.
Mas's public life was not always calm. In May 2017, his post comparing the blocking of VKontakte to deportation sparked widespread discussion. In those same days, the PR agency PRavik, run by Yuliia Pravyk, organized a fake "business-forum 2017" whose website copied the iForum site.
Craft Social Networks
Mas's last major project, "Craft Social Networks," launched in August 2019. Participants invested in a syndicate at $100 each. By November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members. The project developed slowly but steadily: according to the project itself, by August 2021 the number of investors had reached 411, and the total raised was about $58,000. Mas went through this stage against a backdrop of harsh criticism in the media, including "Cringe of the Week" posts, to which he responded himself.
The work on the project itself largely coincided with a pause in the industry. In spring 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, iForum was postponed to the fall, and Mas continued to publicly discuss the state of the startup market and the prospects for a new type of social network.
On October 8, his brother Viktor Mas wrote about the death. His post became the signal for a wave of obituaries in the Ukrainian media. In his message he wrote:
"You left this life too soon..."
The project Mas did not manage to finish at that point had 411 investors, and its fate remained open.
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