Tomas Milar Podcast Transcript
Tomas Milar joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Tomas Millar. Tomas Millar is the founder and CEO of Eqvista, an equity management and valuation platform helping private companies manage ownership, understand share value, and navigate shareholder liquidity. A serial entrepreneur with experience building and scaling businesses across the US and Southeast Asia, Tomas is focused on bringing greater transparency and efficiency to private markets.
Through Eqvista, which serves more than twenty-five thousand companies and tracks approximately nine trillion in private company value, he’s advancing technology that connects equity management, real-time valuation, and structured liquidity. Tomas is passionate about helping founders and business leaders make more informed financial decisions as their companies grow.
Well, good afternoon, Tom. Welcome to the show.
Tomas Milar: Thank you so much for having me, Brian. Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate it, and I appreciate you making the time. I know you did a lot of travel from New York, and now you’re in Vegas. Yes. And so I just really do appreciate you traversing time zones and calendars to get here today, especially with your busy travel.
So, so Tom, let me jump into the first question for you here. You’ve built scaled businesses across the US and Southeast Asia, including Startuper and Cheekly, before building Eqvista into a platform tracking trillions in private company value. What inspired you to enter the equity management and valuation market, and what opportunity did you see that others were missing?
Tomas Milar: You know, Brian, you always start with very simple idea, for the product, from the pro-product point of view. So we were in, in corporations back in two thousand and ten. We were helping founders to incorporate a company and ultimately what you do after you incorporate a company, you start with a bank account, right?
But sooner than bank account, you need to distribute stocks to founders. So that was the original idea. Hey, let’s let’s distribute the stocks to founders. So we started with simple PDF, PDF document. We would call it the members of registrar. And yeah, that was the original idea, very simple.
So we built a app a couple years later and you keep adding new services, new business models as you grow. So, few years later, we track trillions. We have the largest valuation model on the market tracking over sixty-five thousand companies, nine trillion in in value and serve thousands of clients.
So yeah that’s always like that. You always start small, and then you evolve as you’re getting bigger.
Brian Thomas: Amazing. Thank you. And obviously, a lot of your background your experience across the US, Southeast Asia building these companies, helping customers you’ve really built Eqvista into one of the largest valuation companies on the market if not the largest, I think you said.
But again, you start out small. You talked about that a little bit where you had to, open the bank and distribute shares, et cetera. And the rest is really history. But again, it’s your background that has really enabled you to build something amazing, so thank you. Tom, traditional company valuations have largely been point-in-time snapshots, even as business conditions change in real time.
Why is this becoming a challenge for founders and investors, and how is Eqvista approaching valuations differently?
Tomas Milar: The private market actually has become far bigger than than we originally anticipated. I was actually with one of the ex- like executive– one of the presidents of Wells Fargo, and they couldn’t me…
they couldn’t get me in the, into the building in New York. A lot of compliance and a lot of securities. So he had to run down, and he couldn’t even bring me in, so he had to run for the laptop and make a lot of Moves in the app before they, they get me in.
So, Wells Fargo has over two hundred thousand employees, and that’s publicly traded company, right? They– their val- their valuation, it’s, what? Like six, seven hundred billion dollars. But similar with the private companies. Private companies were also not intended to be a, a trillion-dollar, trillion-dollar companies.
If you look at most recent IPOs SpaceX obviously OpenAI coming up the, the valuations have grown rapidly in past fifteen years. And the private market is much bigger. Tesla went public fifteen years ago at one point seven, seven billion dollars valuation. We have SpaceX fifteen years later.
We have one point seven trillion thousand times larger IPO. So, the idea behind it is that like, is that every, every private company should ha- should know the value. The wealth accumulated in the private market is so huge. We needed to understand what’s actually the private market value.
So we started very simply with 49A valuation, where you would get to understand what’s the stock price of of of common stocks. And then we moved on the fair market value for the preferred stocks. That’s valuation between you and the investors, where you just try to keep the valuation as high as possible.
And there was a missing piece in the infrastructure and we fixed the pricing discovery with a real-time, real-time valuation
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Real-time valuation building the infrastructure behind that is– was crucial, and that, that’s obviously part of your success there. But you talked about some– The valuation in this area has grown incredibly over the last fifteen years, and you mentioned a couple of big companies like Wells Fargo, obviously, and Tesla and SpaceX, et cetera.
It’s so important in the private market, as you mentioned, that the, the company values are important. Obviously, you need to know fair market value have trust in what companies- Mm-hmm … are evaluated at. It’s so important and that’s what you’re bringing to your customers. So I appreciate that.
Tom, Eqvista is bringing together equity management, real-time valuations, and technology to help private companies better understand and manage ownership. What sets Eqvista apart from traditional providers, and how is technology changing the way companies approach valuations?
Tomas Milar: Very, very, very simple.
If you look at the how the valuation is reported to clients, by our competitors, it’s it’s reported in PDF. And by the time you get a PDF the valuation is already outdated. The PDF, it’s run on three, four months old financials, and then it takes you another month to re– to actually finalize the valuation.
So even though the date, it’s November fifth two thousand twenty-six, you already have five months old valuation because that’s the nature of the PDF PDF report. So but we changed that scenario. We take the data from the clients in real time, and we process the real-time valuation, so you can see the s- the price of your stocks in a publicly traded format.
Ob-obviously, we are not publicly traded company, but we took the benefit and the idea from the market. We learned all the formulas. We took all the valuations, previous valuations, and we built the largest benchmark model on the market. So what distinguish us from the competitors is the is the delivery.
Our valuations are precise, but but– and the, the competitors are not. So that’s the that’s the that’s that’s the biggest. It’s like getting fresh croissant from the oven versus a frozen frozen prefab- prefabricated fro- frozen item from the fridge.
That’s the difference.
Brian Thomas: Yeah. No, I can see that, the analogy there. Obviously something that’s prefabbed, frozen, and shipped versus just fresh out of the oven. And I really like that- Yes … you talked about most val- valuations are presented in PDF. Mm-hmm. And a lot of the times they’re outdated before it even gets to the PDF, right?
But, but we all know- Yes … how that works. And you built real-time valuation, which I think is really important, and you learned a lot from the market, obviously, and created that largest benchmark model out there, and your valuations are precise, and that’s, again, what makes you a game changer.
Tomas Milar: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brian Thomas: And-
Tomas Milar: You’re right …
Brian Thomas: Tom, the last question of the day, if you could share, as companies stay private longer, founders, investors, and employees are facing new challenges around valuations and shareholder liquidity. How do you see private markets evolving over the next five years, and what should companies be thinking about today to prepare?
Tomas Milar: Unlocking, unlocking the wealth that’s the answer here. Think about it. You work for companies for multiple years. Obviously the end game for the stakeholders, it’s to liquidate the stocks. The US economy is great in shared ownership through employee stock option plans investment, small investment.
And you as a small company, you need capital either, money injection or labor. And obviously employees are a big part of the whole story, and they need the liquidity. So over the years, if you… I can give you example, we have a seventy, eighty years old, ten years old company, no IPO, no M&A, and you own thirty, forty thousand of the stocks, right?
And you would love to liquidate the stocks as a early employee. And what we have built is a program called controlled tender offer. You as employee go back to your stock administrator. It’s usually accountant or a lawyer of the, the company lawyer. And you should request how or what are the options to liquidate the stocks.
Not probably all because obviously companies would still love to have you under, un-under contract. But what they do, they can offer you a partnership and buy back the stocks from you and liquidate some of the stocks through a controlled tender offer. So that’s the term where you’re selling stocks back to your company and you get back some money, and you can buy a, a house.
You can buy, you can buy or put a m- a down payment mortgage down payment. So there’s this opportunity which every single company should have on their menu and people should use it
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. Thank you. And I believe you talked about that s- the small companies need that liquidity, right?
Tomas Milar: Mm-hmm …
Brian Thomas: but again, at the end, at the end of the day, when this company issues stocks to their employees there is an incentive there, and you talked about that option, that opportunity for employees- Mm-hmm … to cash out, obviously. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Maybe not cash everything out, but that gives them some help along the way, may- as you said, maybe buy a house or something.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But again, unlocking the world, and I appreciate your insights today. And Tom, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Tomas Milar: All right. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Tomas Milar Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
