347: Value What's Hard to Value with Tom Milar

Tomas Milar, Founder and CEO of Eqvista, is passionate about helping businesses value what’s hard to value by making private company valuations more accurate, transparent, and actionable. Through a product-first mindset and relentless innovation, Tomas has built Eqvista into a leading equity management and private market valuation platform serving more than 25,000 companies, helping founders, investors, and employees make better decisions with real-time company valuations.

We explore Tomas Milar’s PrivateCo Valuation Framework: Industry Data, Private Data, Public Comparables, Client Data, and Audit Defensibility. Tomas explains why accurate private company valuations require combining multiple data sources instead of relying on static reports, how proprietary datasets and public market benchmarks improve pricing precision, and why audit-defensible valuations build confidence for fundraising, compliance, and M&A transactions. He also shares how a product-first approach has fueled Eqvista’s growth while advancing real-time valuations and expanding shareholder liquidity through controlled tender offers.

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Value What’s Hard to Value with Tom Milar

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Tomas Milar, the founder and CEO of Eqvista, a leading equity management and private market valuation platform serving more than 25,000 companies. Tom, welcome to the show.

Steve, thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

Well, you’ve got a very interesting background and business. We talked before the show that both of us are from Europe, studied in different countries, and come from a financial background. So it’s very interesting. Out of the 350-plus guests I’ve had, I’ve never had someone with such a similar background.

Interesting. Thank you. Yes. I took every opportunity to study anywhere. One semester I studied at three different universities at the same time. So yes, I was taking exams left and right at different universities. It would be April in Finland, May in Turkey, and later June back in the Czech Republic.

That’s great.

In one week, I would really make that whole circle. Crazy times.

I heard about professors teaching at multiple universities, but students attending multiple universities… Maybe two at the same time in the same country.

But I had three.

Three in different countries? That’s completely crazy. I guess if you wanted to fast-track your career, get to Silicon Valley young, start a company, and already reach a modicum of success, you had to do that, right?

You know what? Or you drop out of school and do zero schools. That’s also an option. Now let’s be serious for a bit. For me, it wasn’t really about the education. For me, it was whether I could make it. So it was more of a challenge than an academic achievement. Yeah, it was a fun time back then. I would have a Tuesday exam in Turkey, then fly north. I would have to change clothes in Prague because in Finland I was only about 50 miles from the Polar Circle. It would still be winter there, so I’d pack winter clothes and then take an exam in Oulu, which is almost at the Polar Circle. Yeah. So from Istanbul to the Polar Circle. It was a fun time back then.

I saw it on your LinkedIn page—North Ostrobothnia—and I couldn’t imagine where that place was. So I actually Googled it, and the pictures were all ski slopes. I figured it had to be a cold place.

It was very cold. Yes. A lot of saunas.

Yeah, that’s lovely. Let’s get into the topics. One question I always ask my guests is: What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business?

You know, I learned the hard way that you never ask “why.” At least for me, after living in China. Things just happen. They just happen. Some people don’t really know certain things are possible until they make them possible. So from impossibility to possibility. It’s always interesting to see things happen without a rational reason. I don’t think it’s really about a why. I think it’s really about being naïve when you do things, just doing them, and figuring things out along the way.

Yeah. Well, I agree with you about naïveté. I believe it’s a great entrepreneurial trait because it allows you not to kill good ideas..

Yes, yes. …before they have a chance to develop. And Steve, the more you know about certain things, the less likely you are to start a business in that particular industry, right? Doctors never start hospitals. Bankers never start banks or neobanks because they understand how difficult it is. So that naïveté—to be foolish and hungry—it really works. Yeah. Actually, that’s what works for me. Again, I never thought about business ideas in terms of why I should be doing them. Let me ask you this instead.

What energizes you about running Eqvista?

I think it comes in different phases. Right now, we’re going to launch a controlled tender offer. For those who don’t know what that is, when you issue stock to employees or investors, you can get it back. We don’t really like the term “buy it back,” but that’s essentially what happens. Once you issue options or stock, you can actually buy it back and redistribute those same shares to different investors or shareholders. That’s our new product. We have a very big challenge in front of us, and it’s how to price stock.

We perform valuations on over $8 billion of client assets every month. We’re one of the largest equity valuation platforms on the market. That’s actually what energizes me. Not really the number, but how hard it is to become number one and what drives innovation. Because if you want to be number one at anything, you need to innovate. What we've actually fixed is the report. When you issue stock, you need to have a stock price. Share on X

That stock price reflects the market, how the company is doing, and the different funding rounds. Usually, you find that stock price in a report. It’s a PDF—40 to 60 pages. By the time you receive the report, the valuation is already outdated. One month. Two months. Three, four, five, even six months. In 2026, startups move so fast that in six months some companies grow exponentially. Yeah.

I saw your LinkedIn post about SpaceX. There was an April 2026 valuation of $1.6 trillion. Then you posted again four days ago, showing it was over $2.6 trillion. That’s more than a 40% increase in just two months for one of the most valuable companies in the world. Yeah. How does that happen?

Particularly for SpaceX, there are multiple factors. There’s definitely hype, no doubt about it, because 95 times revenue—that’s ridiculous, right? For a publicly traded company, we usually see six or seven times revenue. That’s probably the best multiple. But 95 times revenue—that’s unheard of. How does that happen? There are multiple reasons, right? One of them is innovation. Another is that SpaceX is the only company actually launching spacecraft into orbit.

And yeah, obviously, there’s the Elon Musk factor. If you look at the space economy, whatever we’re doing on Earth, we’ll be doing the same things in space, right? So looking at SpaceX as a bridge between the dream of space and practically mirroring what we do here on Earth, I think that’s a great analogy.

For us, it's a really nice demonstration of how any company going public should have a real-time valuation. Share on X It doesn’t have to be publicly available. You can choose. Again, think about how Merrill Lynch—I think it was Merrill Lynch and Bank of America—helped with the roadshow and all the due diligence and documents. I can’t even understand how they modeled the valuation one time. They probably had to do that every three days.

But if they had a real-time valuation, they could clearly understand what was happening in the market. So, going back to your original question about what excites me, this is exciting because we built the largest valuation model on the market. Currently, without SpaceX—because SpaceX would take up half of the benchmark—we constantly value over $4 trillion in assets.

Okay. So let’s talk about this because, in my time at my investment banking firm, we had a valuation practice, and we offered six different types of valuations. But really, we just wanted to have an enchilada process where we would have EVA valuations, multiples, private and public comparables, DCF, and all that stuff. But I’m really wondering because, when you’re valuing small private companies, you’ve got all these liquidity discounts, marketability discounts, ownership discounts, all these discounts.

So it kind of boggles my mind how you guys can value all these startups, which may not even have revenue and may be very early-stage. Because this podcast is about frameworks, I’d like you to share with us—with me and the listeners—a framework that simplifies this whole valuation. What are the major elements? If you had to constrain yourself to five major elements of your valuation, what would they be?

Yeah, I can definitely help with that. Obviously, the first one is the industry, right? The industry. We have our models and datasets that we’ve acquired over the years. We have valued $400 billion in client assets manually. Okay. Manually. Even before AI, we were using AI, right? So we really tested the models. We really worked on what works and what doesn’t. That’s one element. It’s the dataset.

Obviously, public comparables. We have incredible models for choosing and picking the right companies, right? There are 4,000 publicly traded companies on the market. That’s a very important dataset. Then we have data taken directly from clients. That’s also very important. The data actually reflects the reality of the company. Obviously, you can estimate, but all these estimates…

There are platforms out there that give you a range. There’s actually a company now that tried to copy us, but they came up with such an unfortunate solution. They have a range. And Steve, who knows the range? Let’s say you have a $100 million company valuation. They came up with a valuation range of $30 million to $100 million. Two hundred?

Okay, great.

Thirty to one hundred. Thirty to one hundred. Okay. I’m like, “That’s not even a range.” It’s ridiculous. So, again, you can try to copy it, but it’s not going to work. You have to have analysts. We have an in-house team of close to 20 valuation analysts with double master’s degrees, CBAs, CFA Level III, and NACVA certifications.

So we can also issue certified reports. We can support all the defensibility. So, in case any company is undergoing M&A, we can help with additional questions from the Big Four, McKinsey, or PricewaterhouseCoopers when they challenge the valuation. We can defend the stock price. It doesn’t really happen when we issue the stock, but it happens down the road.

Yeah. That’s fantastic. So let me ask you this. What drives growth at Eqvista?

What drives growth at Eqvista? The product. It’s really as simple as that. The product and our company economics. We don't really waste time and energy on things that don't work. We focus heavily on what really works and only on what works. Share on X We haven’t raised much money, right? We bootstrapped the company. We raised half a million dollars. I always gave up on fundraising because I’m a product founder.

I don’t really do many roadshows or meetings. I actually hate meetings. I stay with my team. I’m product-centric, super focused on the product, and I think that’s one of the reasons we’re successful. I’ve always been fortunate to build amazing products and hire very talented people who can understand what we’ve built and sell it. So it’s the product. I’ve always believed in pull marketing rather than push marketing.

Obviously, outbound outreach is also extremely important. But pull marketing is where you start, especially in the early stage when you want to grow to, let’s say, half a million, one million, or two million dollars in revenue. Because direct sales are extremely hard.

So what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business?

It’s the price. It’s the stock price. How to effectively value companies. That’s what excites me, and that’s what we try to figure out on a practically daily basis. We have a team of specialists focusing on stock pricing and stock price discovery. Adoption is going to be extremely important. How successful we’ll be in distributing the stock price to different segments of the market.

I’m trying to understand this. You already have 25,000-plus companies whose valuations you manage. You’re able to defend these valuations in court or in M&A situations. So what do you mean exactly by trying to figure out how to effectively value companies? I mean, it sounds like you’ve figured it out. So to what degree have you not figured it out?

We have it, right? But for us, it’s about efficiency. Efficiency and how precisely we can price the stock. That’s probably the big question, even for the public market. Some companies are underpriced. How is it possible that a company with a strong balance sheet has a lower value than the cash in its accounts? These are the types of things.

It’s definitely a different approach to value a company with a couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue versus a company with $300 million in revenue and a $22 billion post-money valuation. These are crazy formulas and approaches. We’re still working on the precision because, at that scale, companies are extremely sensitive to any type of deviation. Even one percent can mean hundreds of millions of dollars.

So that’s very important. Actually, it’s also very important for startups to realize that, at the lower level, they might be undervalued by a few hundred thousand dollars or a few million dollars. That’s also something founders, CEOs, and CFOs should really be considering. That’s why real-time valuation is extremely important for all of us. We’re just trying to teach the market about real-time valuation.

Yeah. I can imagine. Even listed companies that have public data can move dramatically based on market sentiment. Something happens in Iran, and the stock can drop ten percent in a day. What could happen in a private company when you don’t have real-time data available?

Yes.

It’s going to be a really thorny issue.

It is.

So if you had a magic wand, Tom, and you could fix one thing in your company in the next twelve months, what would that be?

Adoption. Real-time valuation adoption. How we teach the market about real-time valuation. That would be the thing I would love to fix. Share on X We actually have a few ideas about how to do it. We’re becoming our own client. We’re becoming our own client, so we’re actually launching a controlled tender offer—a secondary marketplace, practically. Down the road, we could apply for an ATS, an Alternative Trading System. But that’s eight, nine, or ten months from now. At least that’s our vision, and that’s where we’d like to be headed.

So you’re going to do something like a relisting or a reverse IPO?

Not really a reverse IPO. No. Just to help shareholders liquidate their stock. It’ll practically be a platform where employees or investors can liquidate their stock. That’s something we’d like to focus on. We issue stock, manage it, reprice it, and we’d also like to help provide liquidity.

Wow. These are very exciting challenges.

Yes.

A lot of people have tried to overcome this, so if you do, you’ll definitely be pioneers in this area. Perhaps AI can help with that.

Perfect. Yeah. I have a list of people I know, how to use them, and when. So you’re always welcome.

All right. If people would like to learn more or contact you, where can they find you? Or where can they find Eqvista? How can they connect with you and learn more?

Yeah. I can definitely help with multiple subjects: company formation, bootstrapping a company, any product-related questions, and, obviously, equity management, stock pricing, valuation discovery, efficiency, and, most importantly, anything about Eqvista. You can find us at eqvista.com. E-Q-V-I-S-T-A dot com. The same goes for email. It’s tom@eqvista.com.

Okay, awesome. You can check Tom out on LinkedIn as well. That’s Tomas Milar. I think you’re listed with your longer first name. He posts regularly—very exciting articles, especially the recent one I saw on SpaceX and how the valuation shot up like a rocket. Definitely check it out.

If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you subscribe, follow us on YouTube, give us a review on Apple Podcasts, and stay tuned because once or twice a week we bring you exciting entrepreneurs like Tom, who share their frameworks with you. So thanks for coming, Tom, and sharing your insights. And thanks for listening.