Zonayad “Zee” Akbar

From pre-med to scaling unicorn startups, Zee brings relentless product discipline and a combat-sports mindset to everything MorPro builds.

Zee started at Hunter College on a pre-med track — the kind of path that looks great on paper but didn’t match the fire inside. He was drawn to building things, not memorizing textbooks, so he made the call most people talk about but never make: he left school to go all-in on startups. It wasn’t reckless — it was a calculated bet on himself, and it paid off.

He joined a high-growth startup early and helped scale it to unicorn status — not in a support role, but in the trenches, launching multi-million-dollar initiatives and shipping product at speed. That experience taught him the difference between products that look good in a pitch deck and products that survive contact with real users.

When Yamil approached him about MorPro, Zee saw the same pattern he’d seen in every industry ripe for disruption: massive market, fragmented tools, operators drowning in manual processes. As CPO, he now leads product for the entire MorPro platform — from the Trucking-as-a-Service investor experience to the AI-powered dispatch tools carriers use daily. His approach is grit-driven: ship fast, listen to users, iterate relentlessly.

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

In Maverick Course 101, Zee teaches the systems side — how the work actually gets done when the owner isn’t touching it.