Oleksii Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974 and studied at physics and mathematics school No. 145, which produced several notable names for Ukrainian IT. In nearby graduating classes were Sergey Guriev, Tymofiy Mylovanov, Andriy Kobolev, former head of Naftogaz, Vladyslav Chechotkin of Rozetka, and Dmytro Sholomko of Google Ukraine. The founders of Viewdle, an image recognition company that Google bought for $45 million, were also graduates of the school's 1991 class.
Mas won olympiads and entered the radiophysics faculty without exams. From his third year he worked as a programmer at NIIASS, then at Ukrainsky Kapital bank. From 1997 he was a leading specialist at the National Bank of Ukraine and administered payment processing. In parallel, he wrote science fiction for the magazines Raduga and Porog and created the website of the science fiction workshop 'Third Force'.
Projects that made money and closed
In 1999, together with his classmate Ruslan Dmitrakovych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network. Dmitrakovych provided a free channel through the provider, and at its peak in 2000–2001 the network brought in up to ten thousand dollars a month for a team of ten. In 2000, with investor Alexander Soroka, Mas created UAportal, a catalog and aggregator where 'Tree of Friends' appeared. According to Soroka, this service appeared before the era of social networks. In 2007 the portal was sold to the holding.
In 2003, together with Alexander Olshansky, he launched the photo hosting Infostore, which over time turned into a file-sharing service. On 4 December 2008, the police seized the servers. The equipment was returned a year later, but by then the project had closed., which some publications linked to Mas's name, was created, as Forbes writes, by Ivan Savchenko, a native of Infostore, and he declined to comment to the publication.
In 2009 iForum appeared. The first was put together in about two weeks and scheduled for 1 April. By 2012 attendance exceeded 5,000 people, and Olshansky became the main sponsor and chairman of the organizing committee. In the same year 2012, Mail.ua was sold to its Russian namesake, Mail.ru, and the deal with Olshansky was valued at about $0.5 million. Then came an online store, a car club, guide apps, and, owned by Dmytro Lappo.
In an interview with KRYM, Mas estimated that in his life he had about twenty projects, roughly half of which were successful. According to him, he himself earned between one and one and a half million dollars, and his teams received the same.
Corporate career and 'Craft Networks'
In 2013 he worked on mobile applications at Digicode, then at Nebo15 for Andriy Dryha. In 2015 Mas became an adviser on IT and digital to the president of Kyivstar, Petro Chernyshov, and later headed the company's Innovation lab. He left Kyivstar in July 2019. Already in August of that year he launched 'Craft Networks' with a promise of a share for $100. The syndicate grew to several hundred people, and Petro Chernyshov, according to Forbes, invested one hundred dollars out of solidarity.
Forbes interviewed about a dozen investors. None of them saw a working prototype, but no one accused Mas of inaction. Soroka spoke of problems with the team and the speed of work. Responding to criticism in August 2021, Mas cited 411 investors and about 58 thousand dollars raised by the syndicate.
The red shirt and 'The Dao of a Businessman'
At every iForum Mas appeared in a red shirt, and drove a red Dodge Nitro with the license plate 'DZEN'. At Kyivstar he changed it to blue so as not to look like a 'spy from Vodafone'. He called himself a Buddhist, and his life rule, 'The Dao of a Businessman', boiled down to three things: trust intuition, believe in people, and love your mistakes.
'Money interested him only in a utilitarian sense,' said Alexander Olshansky.
Ruslan Dmitrakovych recalled something else: 'He was persistent, it was important to him to stand out, to understand and to know better than anyone.' Sergey Petrenko of Searchengines called the Ukrainian Banner Network a landmark project, and Dmytro Lappo said that Mas invented 'crazy crap' that worked.
Oleksii Mas died on 6 October 2021 at the age of 47. Forbes links his death to a long illness, but the official cause was given as an accident. He was buried at Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv.
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