SM Zonayad “Zee” Akbar

Trucking is where Zee comes from and what he does. He started young, has spent over 8 years deep in the industry, and today leads his own carrier, Pathway Transportation — real operator experience, not theory.

Zee got into trucking young, and for over 8 years he’s lived every side of the business — dispatch, operations, compliance, rates, brokers, and the daily grind of keeping trucks loaded and moving. Starting that early means his experience runs deeper than his years: while others were reading about the industry, he was in it, learning what actually keeps a trucking company profitable when the market turns.

That extensive, boots-on-the-ground experience is what pulled him into trucking tech as a founder. He’d lived the pattern every disrupted industry shares: massive market, fragmented tools, operators drowning in manual processes — and he set out to build the tools he wished he’d had in the truck yard.

Today Zee leads his own transportation company, Pathway Transportation, running the same playbook he teaches. Everything at Pathway runs on systems he built himself — dispatch boards, driver scorecards, load-selection rules, and automated check calls that keep the fleet moving without him sitting in the middle of it. His approach is grit-driven: ship fast, listen to drivers, iterate relentlessly.

Along the way, Zee has helped many people become successful CEOs of their own trucking companies — coaching them from first authority to real, running operations. That same drive keeps him at the front of innovation in trucking tech, pushing what AI and automation can do for carriers.

Outside the yard, Zee is a serious combat-sports practitioner. Wrestling shaped how he runs a fleet — discipline over talent, composure under pressure, mastering the fundamentals before anything flashy. No shortcuts, no skipping steps.

That depth of experience — 8+ years in the industry, a carrier of his own, and a track record of turning operators into CEOs — is exactly what makes Zee an instructor at Trucker College. In Maverick Course 101, he teaches the systems side — how the work actually gets done when the owner isn’t touching it — drawn straight from how he runs Pathway Transportation every day.