Meet Viki Slavin, a hi-tech champion who feeds the hungry during COVID-19

After sleeping at the Moscow airport as a Jewish child in the USSR seeking to come to Israel, Slavin is the head of her own hi-tech company.

By HAGAY HACOHEN
Co-founder of ProdOps Viki Slavin (photo credit: Courtesy)
Co-founder of ProdOps Viki Slavin
(photo credit: Courtesy)
When ProdOps co-founder Viki Slavin was 10 years old, the 1989 Romanian Revolution erupted, which meant that she had to spend roughly two months sleeping at the Moscow Airport while the Jewish Agency was sorting out how to get her family to Israel.
After arriving in Israel, “I was invited to attend a Lag Ba’omer celebration,” she told The Jerusalem Post, “and being a good Soviet child, I showed up with my best dress and a ribbon in my hair on the sands of Ashkelon expecting a social event, and discovered that the holiday is based on roasting potatoes and inhaling fire smoke.”
Slavin quickly adapted to life in Israel, opting to enroll at Ben-Gurion University to study business management.
In the USSR, there was an ideology of worshiping work. Slavin, who is a self-defined workaholic, putting in “36 hours a day,” took something of that mindset into business. While working in a bank, she was told that there is a bug in the computer network the bank had been using. Other people might have shrugged and went about their day, but she decided to master this new field and began teaching herself technology, eventually learning cloud infrastructure. 
While working for software company MIT, she met Evgeny Zislis and tried to recruit him for a position. Unbeknownst to her, Zislis, who comes from the world of technical solutions, had been frustrated with the bottlenecks hampering his work.
“Imagine you are moving,” he told the Post, “and that you just hauled a sofa out of the building but there is no pickup truck – and you have to stand around waiting for it to show up. Now imagine that this happens hundreds of times within a company. The sofa is the solution you develop and that delivery is known as the hand-off.”
Zislis was frustrated. When he rode the bus home and saw that someone had written on a car outside the bus window “Slaves! Wake Up!” he had a moment of clarity and quit his job. Which is why, when Slavin spoke with him, he told her that “I am done being a slave and watching my code ending up in the garbage can.”
She liked his spirit, and in 2011, the two of them created ProdOps.
What does ProdOps do? Imagine a cab station: The station has so many cabs and perhaps one dispatcher. When things are more or less normal, the dispatcher gets calls and tells the cab drivers where to go. However, it is now raining and people usually call in greater numbers to get cabs. The dispatcher is unable to take so many calls and has to decline some of them for lack of taxis.
Now imagine that the cab-station and the dispatcher are not real but a digital creation stored in a cloud. Not having a physical body, the creation could accept hundreds of calls. The space to host these extra dispatchers would expand in the cloud, as we’re talking about information units and not actual people in a building – but how would you know how much space to rent so as not to be caught in the rain?
When Gett – an Israeli on-demand mobility company – contacted ProdOps, the company was able to help it expand to Russia and the UK by ensuring that the application is “fed” information by the meteorology services. So if it is about to rain, Gett expands its station and “hires” more operators to accept the calls. When the weather is decent, the station “shrinks” and the number of operators is cut back.
As the country currently faces the coronavirus pandemic, Slavin, who lives in Ashdod, saw a post by a hi-tech person who asked in a forum: “Are there any restaurants in this city that take Ten Bis?” She had an idea.
Ten Bis was originally created to help hi-tech companies feed their workers by offering them a budget they could use to select meals from a variety of restaurants and eateries. But “we, as hi-tech workers, are going to survive this calamity,” she told the Post, but “other people will not. What about them?”
So she decided to use her own company’s Ten Bis budget to feed Ashdod residents who are facing extreme uncertainty in these difficult times. She points out that she couldn’t do it without the cooperation of various NGOs that offer nutritional help, such as Leket, Lev Ehad and the Ashdod municipality.
She explains that it is a lot more complex than ensuring that a hot meal is brought to this or that person, since “one person may not need the meal, but he brings it to a neighbor who cannot walk.
“We have had such cases of families that can’t leave the house because of the virus or because of poor health, or because they are afraid,” she said, “and this is why we need volunteers and good communication between social workers and charities.”
Those interested in helping as volunteers or donating, as well as those who need meals, can contact Slavin via her mobile number, which is 054-667-0024.


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