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Tom Milar has spent over a decade building infrastructure for private companies — first through incorporation services out of Hong Kong and Las Vegas, and now through Eqvista, a valuation and equity management platform serving 23,000 startups. After a successful acquisition, Tom took five of his most important team members and set out to fix a problem he kept running into himself: founders were managing ownership and valuation off static PDFs and Excel sheets, working from data that was already months out of date by the time it landed. Eqvista's answer is a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets and gives founders, employees, and investors a live look at what their company is actually worth — like a stock ticker for private companies.

This conversation matters because valuation sits underneath almost every consequential decision a founder makes — raising, hiring, issuing equity, planning an exit — and most founders are working with a number that's stale, opaque, or both. Tom brings a rare combination of product obsession and financial discipline to the table, having bootstrapped Eqvista to scale on roughly half a million dollars rather than chasing rounds. For any founder thinking about their cap table, their next raise, or how to give their team real liquidity, this episode is a clear-eyed look at where private markets are heading.

Key Topics Covered

• The problem with PDF valuations — Why the months-long lag between financials and a finished valuation report leaves founders making decisions on outdated numbers.
• Real-time valuation at scale — How Eqvista's engine continuously values 20,000+ companies and the data behind a $4 trillion valuation engine.
• Controlled tender offers and liquidity — How company-led tender offers let founders set the price and structure liquidity for employees and investors on their own terms.
• Bootstrapped, product-led growth — Why a free cap table, paid valuations, and relentless customer support drove scale without heavy fundraising.
• The most common cap table mistakes — What early founders get wrong with paid-up capital, adjusted cost base, and overcrowded cap tables.

Key Insights

1. Valuation is a byproduct, not the prize. Tom and Maxim align on the idea that a strong valuation flows from belief in the founder, the idea, and the market size — not the other way around. Founders who chase the number rather than the fundamentals are optimizing for the wrong thing.
2. De-risk before you raise. Tom's view is that founders should build a product that works, reaches real revenue, and approaches profitability before going to investors — so capital becomes fuel for acceleration rather than a bet on whether the business works at all. He's openly skeptical of early-stage bridge rounds as a sign that the original plan stalled.
3. The story behind the price is the product. What separates a defensible valuation from a guess is the ability to explain why the number is what it is. Eqvista's edge isn't just the figure it produces — it's the pricing narrative built on hundreds of billions in valued assets that auditors and shareholders can actually rely on.

Links

• Eqvista: https://eqvista.com/
• Tom Milar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasmilar
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp

About Tom Milar

Tom Milar is the Founder and CEO of Eqvista, a platform for company valuation, equity management, and private-market liquidity serving 23,000 startups. Originally from the Czech Republic, he moved to Asia in 2009 and built incorporation-services businesses before launching Eqvista with a core team carried over from a prior successful exit. He is a product-first founder who scaled the company through bootstrapping, freemium adoption, and a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets.