In 2016, iForum remained the main platform for Ukraine’s internet community, and Mas was almost one of its own. He helped shape the forum’s programme, and this year he led the Internet Business track. The track was opened by Alexander Olshansky, co-organizer of the forum and investor in Mail.ua. Among the speakers were Pavel Kravchenko of Distributed Lab with a talk titled ‘Digital Freedom. Bitcoin. Blockchain,’ Andrey Milinevsky, director of digital transformation at Kyivstar, Sergei Marin of Vympelcom, and Denis Zhadanov of Readdle with the topic ‘Apps Are Dead, Long Live Apps.’
The forum itself grew out of a project Mas knew from the inside. The first Ukrainian Forum of Internet Figures took place on 1 April 2009, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Ukrainian Banner Network, and drew 1,280 participants. Mas launched the banner network in January 1999 together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich: it was a Perl script, three weeks of work and about $100 in expenses. In March 2000 he became director of the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal), and in 2008 he worked as an architect at Mail.ua, whose closed beta in August was backed by more than $1 million in investment.
Antifragility by Example
Antifragility as a concept was popularized by Nassim Taleb: it is the property of systems not merely to withstand shocks but to become stronger from them. Mas applied the idea to markets in a simple way, through companies that have upended entire industries. Uber, he said, is disrupting the taxi business, while Couchsurfing, where travellers stay with locals for free, is disrupting the hotel business. For an audience many of whom worked in internet advertising, development and telecoms, such examples were not abstractions but a description of their own market.
Mas named big data and blockchain as the main trends. Blockchain, the distributed ledger that underpins bitcoin, was being discussed in 2016 by banks and startups alike, and at the same conference Kravchenko spoke about it. For the Ukrainian market the topic was especially close to home: around cryptocurrencies and distributed ledgers there was then debate about regulation, while large companies were looking for ways to apply these technologies without the speculation around coins.
A Shop with No One Behind the Counter
Of his theses, Mas considered the most practical to be sales through messengers and bots via QR code. He called it a breakthrough and cited the Sender platform launched by PrivatBank. His logic was this: the buyer scans the code, communicates with a bot in a messenger and pays for the purchase without a checkout or looking for a sales assistant. ‘A little more, and we’ll be back in the shop again, only it will be served by robots,’ he said, describing the future of retail.
In the internet business of 2016 the idea of bots was only just gaining popularity, and many companies were experimenting with them without knowing whether they would catch on. Mas, judging by his talk, had no doubt they would, and the question was the speed at which users would move from apps to chats.
Columbus and Artificial Intelligence
Speaking about artificial intelligence, Mas was noticeably gloomier than when talking about retail. According to him, when AI is invented, and that will happen in twenty to thirty years, ‘humanity will come to an end.’ He immediately qualified that such a scenario was ‘not a fact at all.’ The image he used to describe people’s position before a new technology was historical:
‘We’re like the Indians of Columbus’s time’
Mas himself remained a technological optimist in practical matters. His career was built on the fact that new communication channels quickly turn into business, and this is confirmed by the path from Visa bank processing at the National Bank of Ukraine in the late 1990s to the mail and search projects of the 2000s.
In its obituary, wrote that Mas headed Kyivstar’s innovation laboratory for three years, and in 2019 launched ‘craft social networks’ with donors’ money. He died in Kyiv on 6 October 2021 at the age of 47 after an illness. His brother Viktor Mas announced the death on 8 October.
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