He and his brothers built two successful tech ventures and launched a startup incubator at UMD.

When Zeki Mokhtarzada (B.S. ’01, computer science and mathematics) delivers his commencement speech to undergraduates this May at the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, he’ll be speaking from a wealth of experience—and UMD memories. His own graduation 22 years ago was more than special. Two of his siblings also received their degrees from Maryland that day, but that commencement event—or more accurately, the moment he snuck out of it—marked the start of Mokhtarzada’s hugely successful career as a tech entrepreneur.

"I remember my brother Haroon and I snuck out of graduation to go over to the Skinner building—they had open computers there—so we could check the numbers for our new company Freewebs,” Mokhtarzada recalled. “We’d just launched a week before that and when we checked the sign-ups, we realized we had 34 users that day. That was actually the moment we realized, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be a big business—34 people signed up, this is gonna be huge!’”

And it was. In the years that followed, Zeki and his brothers climbed the charts to superstar status in the tech startup world. By 2011, they sold their College Park startup Freewebs (later renamed Webs, Inc.) to VistaPrint for a cool $117.5 million. Then in 2021, Rocket Companies snagged the Mokhtarzada brothers’ next venture, the multimillion-dollar subscription management app Truebill, for $1.275 billion. (It has since been rebranded as Rocket Money.)

Now, with years of experience as an entrepreneur, consultant and tech advisor, Mokhtarzada serves as chief technology officer for Tenovos, a New York-based startup leading in next-generation digital asset management. He’s also a familiar face on the UMD campus as a mentor and advisor for student entrepreneurs, through the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and his family’s own startup incubator called the Mokhtarzada Hatchery. For Mokhtarzada, working with the UMD startup community is all about giving back.

“To me, it’s just a way to pay it forward,” he explained. “It’s a way to show my gratitude for all the people who helped me along the way.”

Programming computers—in elementary school

Born in Turkey, Mokhtarzada spent the first years of his life in Afghanistan. When he was five, his family fled from the turmoil of the Soviet invasion and came to the U.S. as refugees, settling down in Montgomery County, Maryland. By the time Mokhtarzada was in elementary school, his parents had started a home-based business and his father encouraged him to start experimenting with computers.

“We had computers in our house before most people did—it was part of the office—so I learned a lot about office computing through that experience,” Mokhtarzada recalled. “We had this big IBM PC with two floppy drives, and my dad said, ‘Hey why don’t you learn to program this thing.’ So, I was pretty much self-taught.”

Mokhtarzada’s interest in computers and programming grew, and by the time he finished 10th grade, he was taking college-level courses at UMD.

“We connected with Dr. John Gannon, who was the department chair at the time, and he became a mentor for me,” Mokhtarzada said. “I started taking classes at Maryland that summer and again the summer of 11th grade and then 12th grade I did dual enrollment, half the day I was at high school and then I was at the University of Maryland taking classes.”

When it was time for college, Maryland was the obvious choice. Mokhtarzada spent his college years building a strong skill set for the next-generation tech he wanted to create.

“At Maryland, that’s really where I learned how to code and design programs and how data structures work, how databases work, how the machine architecture itself works,” he explained. “It gave me a really strong foundation, skills I still use today.”

Dropping out—and rushing back

In 1999, Mokhtarzada dropped out of college to join a startup called HyperOffice, gaining valuable expertise in web development along the way. But when dot-coms started going bust, so did the job. Mokhtarzada knew what he had to do.

“I remember I didn’t waste any time,” he recalled. “I got laid off at like 10 in the morning and I went straight to the Mitchell building and I told them ‘I have a couple missing credits I need to finish.’”

By the time he graduated in 2001, Mokhtarzada had picked up a second major in mathematics. He went all in with his brothers as they grew and sold their first startup Webs, Inc. and then brainstormed and built the blockbuster personal finance app Truebill. For Mokhtarzada and his brothers, it was a rollercoaster ride to startup success.

“I think I gravitate toward those early days, that’s kind of the sweet spot,” he reflected. “Once you’ve got customers it’s just so exhilarating because you’ve got someone using your product and you’re so motivated because there are people counting on you.”

In 2016, when startup accelerator Y Combinator invested in Truebill and made a commitment to help the company grow, Mokhtarzada’s brothers Haroon, Idris and Yahya headed for the West Coast to take advantage of the opportunity. But Zeki decided to stay in Maryland and apply his entrepreneurial experience as a consultant to the startup community. By 2019, he joined Tenovos as chief technology officer, helping to build the business, one step at a time.

“What I like about this, and startups in general, is you get to build a team piece by piece, you get to build processes, you get to look at what’s working and what’s not working and make drastic changes because the company isn’t huge, there’s not a lot of bureaucracy,” Mokhtarzada explained. “We can all can get in a room and say, ‘Hey guys, let’s change the way we work,’ and then do it, and I really like that.”

Putting Maryland tech on the map

Through his work with startups and his commitment to mentoring students in programs like the Dingman Center and the Hatchery, Mokhtarzada hopes to advance an even bigger mission—putting Maryland on the map as a powerhouse tech ecosystem.

“We have so much going for this area, there’s no reason why we don’t have a stronger tech hub here, specifically in Maryland,” he noted. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be competing on a high level.”

Mokhtarzada also devotes as much time as he can to working with local and national nonprofits.

“I think that’s part of giving back and being a productive member of society,” he said. “I’m the president of the Montgomery Blair High School Magnet Foundation and we help by paying for programs that are no longer available because of budget cuts, things like lab equipment and teacher training. I’m also the treasurer of the One America Movement and we’re addressing toxic polarization in America, bringing groups of people together who typically wouldn’t interact with one another.”

Of all the things Mokhtarzada does to pay his own success forward, his work with student entrepreneurs is especially rewarding, a very real reminder of just how far he’s come.

“I definitely love interacting with those kids and remembering where I was when I was at Maryland myself—and that’s energizing as well,” he explained. “These students are so with it, so impressive with what they’re doing that I kind of wish I’d spent my time as intentionally as they do. For me, it was more about luck, and I happened to be at the right place at the right time.”

Now, as Mokhtarzada looks ahead to his speech at this year’s commencement ceremony, he hopes his success story can inspire the class of 2023 to make their own mark on the world, in whatever way they can.

"It's an exciting time to be alive and I look forward to sharing my experiences and lessons learned,” he said. “I hope that I can inspire the graduates to build the future they want to live in."

Written by Leslie Miller

Alum Tamara “Tammy” Kolda (M.A. ’95, Ph.D. ’97, applied mathematics) leads a poster project to explain how math ‘saves the day’ and improves our daily lives.

When you think of mathematics, what comes to mind? Do you think of a recent internet shopping splurge, your last pizza delivery or today’s weather forecast? If you answered no, Tamara “Tammy” Kolda (M.A. ’95, Ph.D. ’97, applied mathematics) says you’re not alone. In her more than 20-year career as a mathematician, she found that all kinds of people—from decision-makers to educators and even math students—don’t realize how much advances in mathematics and statistics shape the world around us.

“Most people are not aware of the role of mathematics in their daily lives,” she explained.

Kolda hopes to change that. As a member of the National Academies’ Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics, Kolda chairs an all-star committee of mathematicians appointed to raise awareness about how pure and applied mathematical research paves the way for technological and engineering advances that make our lives better.

“The goal is to explain to the scientifically interested public where mathematics comes in,” Kolda explained. “You’d be surprised that even most math majors or statistics majors don’t know all the applications for math and statistics and what career avenues are available to them.”

Instead of lengthy reports or academic papers, Kolda and her committee took a more user-friendly approach to get their math message across: they created a series of posters. Each poster depicts a different aspect of the everyday impact of the mathematical sciences—from internet security to trip planning—and all of the posters are accessible online.

“We’re hoping people will print them and put them up at their institutions or carry them to meetings with their university leaders, for example, to explain what the math department does and the role of math in the larger scheme of science, business and technology,” Kolda explained. “I always thought of another target as people in Congress who are deciding how to allocate research funding, to explain why we still need to do research in mathematics.”

The path to math

For Kolda, who grew up in central Maryland, math has always been an important part of life. She still remembers the fun of summer math and computer camps that fed her interest in equations and problem-solving. Before she headed to college, she considered other options, but not for long.

“I originally thought I’d be a biologist, but I was quickly discouraged by the fact that I could not control things in experiments as precisely as I wanted to,” Kolda recalled. “I didn’t know exactly what I would do with math, but I decided it was something I wanted to pursue.”

After getting her undergraduate degree, Kolda went on to the University of Maryland to begin her graduate work and her path started coming into focus. Initially thinking she would focus on pure math, she soon discovered that applied math was what she really enjoyed, and she realized she was in exactly the right place at the right time. 

“Maryland was a phenomenal experience, it was really the right place to go, there were so many professors I wanted to work with,” Kolda said. “I was particularly excited to meet Jim Yorke who I had heard of because he was featured in the book Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. He was incredibly friendly and gracious, and I had the good fortune to do a reading course with him.”

Around that same time, the internet was just getting started and Kolda quickly found herself on a research path that combined optimization and linear algebra with high-performance computing, a field now known as data science. She worked with Professor Dianne O’Leary, a leading expert in computational science and numerical methods,. For Kolda, the research was as challenging as it was fascinating, and she was driven to succeed.

“I was definitely determined,” she explained. “It’s very hard to get a Ph.D., period. At that time, if you were a woman on top of that, you needed extra determination to make it. Honestly, I was so excited by mathematical research that don’t think anyone could have stopped me.”

From research to real-world experience

During her years at UMD, Kolda spent her summers doing internships that allowed her to apply her growing skillset to real-world situations, first at the National Security Agency in Ft. Meade, Maryland, and later at the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Center for Computing Sciences in Bowie, Maryland.

After earning her Ph.D. in 1997, she went on to do a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility in Tennessee, where she tackled problems in high-performance computing. That led to a position on the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in California, where she worked until 2021.

By then, she was ready for a change, so she started her own consulting firm called MathSci.ai.

“I wanted to see what would happen if I could do whatever I wanted,” Kolda recalled. “I have intellectual freedom to take on new challenges, working with new groups and it’s exciting.”

A visiting professor at Northwestern University since 2021, Kolda brings her scientific research experience in mathematical and computational data science to universities and research groups as well as nonprofits focused on public policy. 

“My mission is to work on interesting problems to popularize new and emerging techniques that help with large-scale data analysis,” she explained. “I’m using techniques from different areas like theoretical computer science and high-performance computing, data analysis, and physics, and bringing these pieces together.”

“Math is almost everywhere”

The recipient of numerous awards and honors for her work, Kolda has served on the National Academies’ Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics since 2018. And when the board asked her to lead a project to raise awareness about the everyday impact of advances in mathematics and statistics, she jumped in with both feet.

“It just seemed like a good thing to invest time in, to broaden the world’s understanding of mathematics,” she recalled. “Math is almost everywhere, which almost makes it harder to see. This project was designed to educate the mathematical community, as well as the broader community on many of math’s different applications.”

Kolda and her committee 

created posters to explain real-life math applications in every facet of our daily routines, such as how the mathematics of cryptography and signal processing keep us safe on the internet.

“One of the first posters we finished was The Mathematics of Internet Security,” she noted. “When you do a credit card transaction on the internet, there’s a lot of security behind it. When you browse the web and see https, that means it’s secure so no one can intercept what’s happening between you and your web server, and it’s all using mathematics.”

One of Kolda’s favorite posters is called Computed Commutes, the Mathematics of Getting from Here to There.

“There’s a lot of sophisticated mathematics that goes into mapping technologies and estimated time of arrival is part of that,” she explained. “It looks at things like traffic and mathematically predicts how long it’s going to be before you get there or how long it will take for a package delivery or even a pizza. It’s very statistically sophisticated.” 

Another poster depicts Math as a comic book hero who saves the day in our everyday lives, a cartoon reminder that mathematics makes its mark in all kinds of ways.

“Artificial intelligence, image processing, satellite and medical images, weather forecasting and climate modeling, and many things in medicine are very mathematical and statistical as well,” Kolda noted. “Math is everywhere.”

Now that these new posters make it easy to see how advances in the mathematical sciences enhance our daily lives, Kolda hopes all kinds of people will get the message.

“For me, success would be seeing these posters plastered in every university and college throughout the U.S. and maybe even beyond that,” Kolda said. “I think it would help future mathematicians and statisticians get an idea of what opportunities are there for them and also help those who are funding mathematics programs understand why sending tax dollars to these purposes is so worthwhile. If we can accomplish that, I’ll be happy.”

Written by Leslie Miller

As co-director of the Girls Talk Math summer camp at UMD, Whitley shows underrepresented students that everyone has a place in mathematics.

Victoria Whitley always loved numbers—until she took high school calculus. The course was so hard and so frustrating that she nearly swore off math for good.

“It was awful,” she recalled. “I cried my way through the whole thing.”

Several years later, as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, she gave calculus a second chance—and this time it clicked. Her professor’s enthusiasm for the subject was so contagious that she decided to drop her physics major and pursue a different path. 

“After that I thought, ‘Oh, maybe math is for me,’ so I decided to switch to an applied math major,” Whitley said. “One good teacher or one bad teacher can really make a difference.”

Now a Ph.D. student in the University of Maryland’s Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation (AMSC) program, Whitley wants to help others find joy in math. She is working to make the field more inclusive as co-president of UMD’s Women in Mathematics group, president of AMSC’s Student Council and co-director of UMD’s Girls Talk Math summer mathematics camp for high schoolers.

On top of all that, Whitley works as a teaching assistant (TA) while conducting research at the intersection of ocean physics and applied math. She works closely with her advisor, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Jacob Wenegrat, who appreciates Whitley’s dedication to her field.  

“Taking on any one of these roles—while also TAing introductory math classes and making progress on a complicated research project—would be a lot for any graduate student,” Wenegrat said. “That Victoria has stepped into leadership roles in so many different ways speaks both to her capabilities and to her commitment to improving the field of mathematics.”

Making waves

As an undergraduate, Whitley learned about a new campus organization called Girls Talk Math, which planned to offer a free two-week math camp to high school students of underrepresented genders. Inspired by the group’s commitment to representation, Whitley signed up as a volunteer and planned experiments and games for the campers.

She helped at the camp for two summers and enjoyed it so much that she chose to attend UMD for graduate school—partly because it had a Girls Talk Math camp, but also because she liked AMSC’s hands-on, interdisciplinary approach to applied math.

She knew she wanted to study fluid dynamics but wasn’t sure what her research focus should be. When she met with Wenegrat, they discussed the various applications of math and oceanography, and Whitley decided she was all in—despite not considering herself an “ocean person.”

“I thought Jacob’s research was really cool, even though I knew nothing about the ocean,” Whitley said. “I finally broke down and told him about a year into our advisee-advisor relationship that I don’t know how to swim, and he gently reassured me that it wasn’t a prerequisite for oceanography.”

In her research, Whitley uses a numerical simulation called the immersed boundary method to study the breaking of internal waves below the ocean’s surface. These processes, which occur continuously on small scales around the world, are thought to play an outsized role in global currents.

“Just like a wave on the surface could break on the shore, you could have a wave inside of the ocean break on sloping boundaries,” Whitley said. “Depending on the angle, if it’s sharp enough, you can get some really interesting dynamics and a lot of mixing, which is really important in the ocean. Global circulation is thought to rely on small-scale mixing on these sloping boundaries.”

‘It can be done’

In the meantime, volunteering for Girls Talk Math continues to be an important part of Whitley’s life. 

Beyond offering new and engaging ways to learn about math, Whitley believes that programs like Girls Talk Math can help prevent “leaky pipelines”—the phenomenon of underrepresented students dropping out of STEM due to systemic factors—by giving students positive experiences early in their education. 

“You have people that leak out of the pipeline early on—in high school, middle school or even elementary school—and that continues through the higher levels until suddenly you see no one who looks like you,” Whitley said. “Without mentorship and without someone there to show you that it can be done, it can be really difficult to stick with it.”

Whitley is currently gearing up for the next Girls Talk Math camp, which will run June 20-30, 2023. She handles most of the camp logistics, from processing applications to hiring team leaders, but says the most rewarding part is making a difference in students’ lives.

“It’s nice being able to reach out and grab high schoolers before they run off to biology or something else—not that there’s anything wrong with the other STEM fields,” Whitley said with a laugh. “I hope by exposing them to these things early on that they’ll remain interested in math and push through their calculus course.”

After all, Whitley has shown that if at first you don’t succeed in calculus, try again. It could just be the start of a long career in mathematics.

Written by Emily Nunez