The Forbes Ukraine article is devoted to the story of one internet entrepreneur. Yaroslav Maksymovych created, an auction trading site, and over several years managed twice to exit the project with money. The journalists recounted how this happened and explained the principle by which Maksymovych built his work on new projects.
Two deals and one principle
In November 2007, Maksymovych sold a controlling stake in to DST and Russkiye Fondy for approximately $0.5 million. In early 2010, the auction itself was bought by Allegro, a Polish trading platform, for around $3 million. Both deals showed that a small Russian-language project could find a buyer with serious money if it operated steadily and occupied its niche.
The main idea of the piece belongs to Maksymovych himself. In the venture business, by his assessment, one needs to make more bets. Out of ten projects, three or four will fail, four to six will be average, and one or two will recoup everything else. For an investor, this is portfolio arithmetic, and it is precisely on such arithmetic that the logic Forbes Ukraine put in its headline rests.
The thesis about bets refers to Maksymovych, while the journalists allotted Mas a single remark about a competing network. This distribution is important for understanding the article: Mas's comment concerns the banner advertising market, not venture investments.
Banner networks in 2011
A banner network sells advertising space across many sites at once, bundling them into a single package for the advertiser. The business relies on volume of impressions, so a place in the ranking of networks is directly tied to revenue. UBS itself, according to Mas's interview of March 21, 2008, was then delivering 36 million impressions per day.
The Ukrainian Banner Network appeared in January 1999, founded by Mas and Ruslan Dmytrakovych. The first version was written in Perl in three weeks, and expenses amounted to about $100. Over the following years, UBS became one of the notable players on the market, and in 2009, for the network's tenth anniversary, Mas and his partners organized the first Ukrainian Internet Professionals Forum, the future iForum. It was attended by 1,280 people.
Mas's comment about Maksymovych's competing project was as follows:
“Currently they are in 3rd-4th place among the large banner networks”
He was referring to, which Maksymovych founded in 2001. According to Mas, there are about fifteen large banner networks in Ukraine, and is among the top four by this measure. An estimate of the project's annual revenue was given by one of its competitors: approximately $200,000. The figure is cited in the article as a competitor's opinion, not as the company's own data.
What happened next
While Forbes Ukraine was writing about the search for buyers and bets on new projects, Mas himself was working on launching a mail service. Mail.ua was presented in closed testing on August 22, 2008. Mas served as the service's architect, and the project received more than $1 million in investment from the Internet Invest group.
In the summer of 2012, Mail.ua passed to Mail.ru Group. Mail.Ru Group vice-president Anna Artamonova confirmed the purchase. According to unofficial data, the deal was worth approximately $500,000, and at that time the service had about 300,000 users.
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