.png)
Episode 120
How They Built Real-Time Valuations—Profitably | EP 120
with Tom Millar - Founder & CEO @ Eqvista
Episode 120
Every cap table company in Silicon Valley is burning venture capital chasing growth. Tom Milar built one that makes money instead — and he did it without ever raising a pre-seed round, despite managing $300 billion in client assets for companies including Perplexity AI. The question this episode refuses to let go of is whether the VC-fueled growth playbook has become so normalized that founders have forgotten there's another way to build. It turns out the founders closest to the problem — the ones who see thousands of cap tables and valuations up close — might have the clearest view of what's actually driving company value.
Tom is the founder and CEO of Eqvista who built and sold the largest incorporation provider in Hong Kong, acquired the largest registered agent in Nevada, and then built a profitable valuation and cap table platform serving 23,000+ companies — all without a single successful fundraising round.
The core of this episode is Tom's "European Hong Kong pragmatism" — a phrase that sounds like a geographic contradiction but is actually one of the most coherent operating philosophies in the episode. Where Silicon Valley rewards the pitch, Tom rewards the product. His argument is direct: the first version of everything — the code, the pricing, the privacy policy, the initial client agreements — has to come from the founder. Not because delegation is wrong, but because no hired CTO or product manager can build what they don't deeply understand. Eqvista's website was, by Tom's own description, hideous for six years. He left it that way deliberately. When he eventually changed the design, conversions didn't move. Neil Patel, who served as board president at one of Tom's acquired companies, had told him the same thing: you can kill a business by touching what's already working. The insight Tom keeps returning to is deceptively simple — build a hierarchy of problems by asking which ones are closest to revenue, and work down from there. Everything else is noise.
The secondary thread is what Tom observes watching founders up close through Eqvista's platform, where he sees not just cap tables but the underlying behaviors of companies raising seed rounds, Series A, and beyond. His diagnosis of why founders move too slowly isn't about effort — it's about sequencing. The founders who fail are the ones who raise $400,000 before doing the heavy lifting themselves, who hire before they understand the product, who feed the beast with venture money before the product is strong enough to stand on its own. The real-time valuation product Tom demos in the episode crystallizes what's at stake: the two factors that drive private company valuations fastest are revenue and how well a founder can sell equity. Everything else — the design, the brand, the org chart — is downstream of those two numbers.
What Roland observes repeatedly at the $1M–$50M stage is that the founders who stay profitable longest tend to have built an intuition about revenue proximity that their VC-backed peers often lack — not because they're more talented, but because they've never had the option of substituting capital for clarity. The discipline Tom describes, building a hierarchy of problems anchored to what makes money, is something most founders only develop after they've run out of runway once. The companies that arrive at Midstage having bootstrapped or stayed lean tend to have sharper product instincts and messier org charts; the ones that raised heavily tend to have the reverse. Neither is inherently better, but knowing which problem you have is the first step to fixing it.
Key Moments
00:39 — Why Tom couldn't raise a pre-seed round despite having multi-billion dollar companies as clients — and why he's not sure it mattered
02:32 — "European Hong Kong pragmatism": what it actually means to build profitable companies in a culture that rewards hype over product
04:45 — Why the first code, pricing, and client agreement must come from the founder — and what gets lost when founders skip that step
08:25 — Two types of founders Tom sees up close: the ones who can raise, and the ones who can build — and why the ideal is rarer than anyone admits
10:02 — The real-time valuation demo: what a living stock price for a private company looks like, and why fund admins processing 500 companies traditionally need six people for six months to do what Eqvista does automatically
13:33 — The one filter Tom uses to cut through every meeting, every email, every decision: what makes money?
14:36 — Why Eqvista's website stayed hideous for six years — and what happened to conversions when they finally fixed it
16:29 — The founder sequencing trap: why raising $400K before doing the heavy lifting yourself is one of the fastest ways to fail
18:01 — The two factors that drive private company valuations the fastest — and what every founder building toward a raise needs to understand first
---
Eqvista is offering Scaling Without Breaking listeners $100 off their plan. If you're a founder managing equity, planning a raise, or wanting a real-time valuation for your company, this is the most direct way in. Use referral code ROLAND_EQVISTA at eqvista.com.
If you're navigating how to structure equity, understand your company's true value, or think clearly about what a raise would actually do to your cap table, Midstage Institute works directly with SaaS and software founders at the $1M–$50M stage to help you make those decisions with clarity before they become expensive mistakes. mdstg.ac/drag-erase
#EmployeeStockOptionPlan #PrivateEquity #VentureCapital #SeedRound #ScalingWithoutBreaking
Roland Siebelink (00:39)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Scaling Without Breaking, the podcast for the people that are done being just a founder and winging it and want to be a CEO that's successful in running a bigger startup. Today's guest, I'm very honored to announce, is half German, half Czech. He splits his time between Las Vegas and the twisted MIRA Tower in San Francisco's financial district.
He built and sold the largest incorporation provider in Hong Kong, and then he acquired the largest registered agent in Nevada. But here's what makes him different. While every cap table company in Silicon Valley burns through venture capital chasing growth, he built something that actually makes money. His platform delivers private company valuations in hours, not months, and it's synced to Nasdaq's trading schedule in real time. Believe it or not, this man manages over $300 billion in client assets, including companies like Perplexity AI. He calls it European Hong Kong pragmatism. In an industry where Carta took a massive valuation hit, his company just keeps growing, and growing profitably. With that, everyone meet today's guest, Tom Milar, the founder and CEO of Eqvista. Welcome to Scaling Without Breaking, Tom.
Tom M (01:54)
I don't even know if I deserve that kind of introduction. Thank you sir.
Roland Siebelink (02:00)
We like to do a good introduction, making sure that everything comes out in one go, that people know how special our guests are on this episode.
Tom M (02:10)
Thank you so much, Roland. Thank you. I'm very happy being here. Thank you so much.
Roland Siebelink (02:15)
Of course. Thank you. It's our honor, actually. Tom, let's dive right in. You called yourself a Hong Kong European pragmatist in Silicon Valley. Everyone around you is raising crazy money and burning it, especially if they're in AI these days. But you're profitable. What do they not understand that you do? do?
Tom M (02:32)
Roland, you know I moved to Hong Kong and scaling without breaking, that actually explains how we succeed. Asia, it's not like in Europe, or even in the United States. You can fail and you can go back again.
Going back to your original question, I built multiple companies, I would say, more than eight. And all of them were profitable. That was always the reason why I was successful in Hong Kong.
I brought the same mentality United States. To be a little bit critical here, I always try to raise money, but I wasn't successful for some reason, even though we support heavily-funded companies, multi-billion dollar companies, inbound sales companies, even though our largest client on the seed level raised 100 million dollars - 100 million dollars, and I was not able to raise the damn one million dollar for our pre-seed, which is extremely funny.
Roland Siebelink (03:41)
Funny and frustrating, perhaps.
Tom M (03:49)
Not really - the way I fundraise, it's just basically, hey, this is what we do, we can become extremely successful.
Pragmatism is something that will probably hold us back a little bit. That's what we have. That's what I brought from Europe. We have a hard time to hype. Europeans, we have a hard time to hype the startup. Or we over-hype it. We don't really know where is the balance?
Hyping the company, it’s one thing, but the other thing is the product. And I believe the product must come from founder. You can't hire a CTO or a product manager who doesn't know the product!
Take the first kick and the first idea, first heavy lifting, the first code, the first privacy policy, the first engagement, the pricing comes from you, from the founder.
Roland Siebelink (04:45)
Since you built eight companies, would you say your model is generally built to flip?
Tom M (04:53)
Not really, no, no, no, no, no.
Actually, I still own a few companies and I'm paying myself a salary
Roland Siebelink (05:00)
Of course, you do the seed the investment thesis of many, many founders quite up close with Eqvista because you tell us a little bit more about what you do. It's actually a valuation platform, is it not?
Tom M (05:14)
Yes, let's start from the beginning.
Tomas Milar, founder of Eqvista.
So what do we do?
We manage equity and we also help with administration. software is one thing. But I'm strong believer that the private market is missing price infrastructure.
Let’s start with the stock price of any stock. We have a 409a evaluation price; 409a is the lowest number stock price when you issue stocks to founders or employees. Then you have a venture round. Some venture round might have different pricing.
Then we have a secondary market. The secondary market has multiple platforms. There's just so many different prices. We are like, hey, let's actually build something that's also really, really cool.
Again, the cap table management, equity management is one thing, but I spent most of my time building the pricing infrastructure. The one true price, which gives any founders, board members, or even the market if you open the price to the public.
Private companies would usually go to get capital, get massive rounds. But now it's not that case. We can go and raise, three, four, five hundred million dollars just like that.
Roland Siebelink (06:48)
So, they stay private much longer and create a lot more value while being in private hands still, right? Is there still any point for retail investors to jump in at IPO price?
Tom M (06:55)
Of course, definitely, definitely. That's probably more what's going on within the company. Obviously, you have failed IPOs.
For us, we are looking at the private market. That's what makes us special because I can clearly say that we will become very soon the largest platform.
Roland Siebelink (07:30)
And 95 % of your customers are US based, it sounds like.
Tom M (07:33)
US based. Yes.
Roland Siebelink (07:36)
And your go-to-market has been built almost entirely on just dominating search engine optimization. Is that right?
Yes, that's right. The SEO was one thing. That's how we actually started. Now it's basically just being online; a heavy, heavy presence. Being online, that's how people can find us.
But it's actually quite interesting. Some founders waste so much time.
I understand if you are hardware company you have to really show the product.
Roland Siebelink (08:15)
You’ve seen many founders, you see them work, you see the differences in valuation of their companies. What's your advice to a founder not to be wasting time? What are the key traps?
Tom M (08:25)
I've met hundreds of entrepreneurs and again, I know the title CEO, but I believe in two types of founders. The founders who can raise money, crazy amount, rounds. Then the one who can make a product. But the ideal founder is something between That comes also with a personality.
I think it is mostly done not fast enough. I believe the execution is the key. Mostly, it's product and I think people neglect the product. They don't understand the pricing. They don't understand how to penetrate the market. They don't know how to sell
to clients. And the way it works is that you have a discussion with your client about the agreement. The client might have five, six, seven, eight different points in the agreement. What do you do? You quickly fix them. The pricing doesn't really fit the market.
You keep changing it until it might make sense. At some point, there would be a time where we would fix the pricing eight times. We'd change eight times.
Roland Siebelink (09:37)
The real compelling value that you provide to founders is this real-time valuation, right? Is that something you can give us a little glimpse of in what you built, what could you show us?
Tom M (10:02)
Oh yeah, I can show you.
Yeah. This is the real time company valuation. Privately owned company, you raised $100 million, $10 or $1 billion, it doesn't matter. You give us limited data and you can build a stock ticker for your company. You can see the valuation of your company in real time. It's good for founder, CEO, CFOs, shareholders. You can also open this to your shareholders, so they can see the value of the company; how it goes up and down.
There are a few more basic information about the medians and averages across different benchmarks and the news. This is very important. We are launching a mobile version so you will be able to see the value of your company in your mobile device.
Roland Siebelink (11:20)
And do you sell this primarily to founders or also to their investors?
Tom M (11:25)
Yes. For founders, actually we have multiple products. This is the mobile app, so you can see the stock price of your company in real time.
There's different use cases. Obviously, founders, they should know what's the company value and that real-time company valuation helps also with different structures, fund structures. Let's say you are a fund admin and you have 500 companies in your fund and it will be so hard to process all the 500 companies traditionally. Each evaluation might take 10, 15 hours. You're looking at 700 hours of work. That's job for six, seven people for six months. By the time they finish the evaluation of the last company, they would have to start evaluation of the first company because it would be already outdated.
managers, they have a stake in these companies. They don't really know what's the value of the company, so let's build something cool. We built a grouping and structuring, so the fund owners, they can see.
how much they own in each company entity and what's the percentage they own, what's the value, how the value has grown over time. Then we group it up all the way to the holding so you can see the stake in each of them under the holding.
We have different use cases. We try to sell it to different funds, leverage funds, and obviously secondary providers.
Roland Siebelink (13:24)
Having started eight companies, you must have built a lot of experience on what as a founder you should focus on versus what are the things that you should just delegate or not even care about. What are your thoughts on that?
Tom M (13:33)
It's a noise. There's so much noise in every meeting, in every email, in our heads. And there's really one simple rule I have, and it's always about what makes money, what makes money, what makes money. That's it.
Example - you build a hierarchy of problems which leads to revenue. Anything that's close to revenue, you prioritize over to what's not as important.
It's very simple, yes.
Roland Siebelink (14:30)
Very simple. Is it making money or not? If it's not making money, why are you bothering me with it?
Tom M (14:36)
Yes. For instance, I can give you an example. I'm actually very proud of it. Our website was hideous for six years.
It would take us six to nine months to do it properly. And I knew that it's not really that important. The design is the last thing that really sells.
Roland Siebelink (15:02)
It's interesting, I've had the same experience, especially targeting startups that the more design there is, the less likely it is to convert.
Tom M (15:10)
Yes, I have very simple rule, two free colors on the website, that's it. Simple button, call us. That's our placeholder. Just don't bother with the design.
I had a discussion - we acquired the company in 2017 in Paradise, incorporation service provider. You probably know a marketing guru, Neil Patel. Do you Neil Patel?
I had a discussion with him whether we should change - after acquisition - whether we should change the design or not. And he's like, you know what, it actually can kill a business. You can kill a business, so just don't touch it. And he was absolutely right. He was the board president back then and I think we had to
Roland Siebelink (15:51)
Right? Don't touch things that are already working, right?
We changed the design, but it was quite funny. It didn't increase the conversions; it did nothing.
Roland Siebelink (16:13)
See, your intuition was right.
When you say, you see many founders being too slow, is that often more an issue of focus or is it more an issue of not having enough people or trying to do too many things themselves? What do you think?
Tom M (16:29)
I think it's just a misunderstanding of what they should do. I think it's just a natural thing. Some founders would make so many wrong decisions. You would raise $400,000 instead of building the program yourself and do the heavy lifting yourself, they would be already thinking about a pre-seed round. They would work for one and a half months, two months, hire a bunch of people and go and raise more money. And once they get through the cycle and you rely on the capital and the ideas from people you are hiring, you're going to fail.
You either rely on a product and do a strong product, so you deploy people who's probably strong, or you feed the beast with venture money. And then it's weak. The best is the combination of both and I can't wait to see it.
Roland Siebelink (17:35)
Tom, another question that, of course, I have a personal interest in, as you know, we work with a lot of scaling companies to help them remove the drag that builds up and accelerate more towards business results. If I were to look at your real time valuation, what are the factors that drive that valuation the highest, the fastest?
Tom M (18:01)
There are two factors. Again, it's the revenue that come first. And then, how much they raised. How much they raised is really about how well they can sell the equity.
I think to be super pragmatic, to find a space where you don't see much competition but the valuations are really high. Just jump into it, but not for the sake of the valuation, but because you understand the model.
Deep tech, you might have zero revenue, raise valuation, But it's a question whether to be opportunistic and go for an industry where you see massive rounds or do whatever you, want to do and understand, or you don't understand you learn, and then try and build a ship.
Roland Siebelink (19:04)
That's awesome. We're almost at the end of the recording, Tom, but I want to always talk a little bit about the person behind the company. We already mentioned in the beginning, you're half German, half Czech. You started your entrepreneurship journey in Prague in 2006. Tell us a little bit more about how you grew up.
Tom M (19:23)
I actually started in Mexico. If you Google what Nopal is? Nopal. I grew the beer out of nopal in Mexico. I got samples from one of the fields not far from Monterrey, Mexico, not California, Monterrey, and brought it to Europe.
If you Google Nopal beer, it's my beer, my invention. That's how I started. That was one of my first. I'm still engaged in that company as an advisor. It's just cool to see the things last, what I built, and there's a legacy behind it.
Roland Siebelink (20:04)
What was it in your childhood or your teenage years that prepared you to become a founder?
Tom M (20:28)
You know what, I think it's ice hockey. And I was never good.
The thing is that you just never give up. That's what I think I learned when I was a kid. For some reason,
I understand the principle that if you never give up, just do a thousand different things every day, and I really do a thousand different things, I touch everything. That's the it's the persistence. Just never give up.
Roland Siebelink (21:05)
How important is it to have that persistence as a founder, to keep going no matter what negative feedback you get?
Tom M (21:13)
Roland, I think it's just the most important thing. I think it is. There's so many ugly days. And when I think of how I started in Hong Kong, I took a train from Beijing to Hong Kong. It was 28 hours long, my journey back in 2010. There was no speed train. It was still like the old train from the 60s, and then you end up in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is an island, so we have to take a boat and MTR metro, And now we are in Hong Kong, we have about $3,500 US dollars in your pocket and we have to somehow find a way how you make it.
Roland Siebelink (22:10)
What is the most important piece of advice you would give a younger founder, somebody who is just trying their first company?
Tom M (22:18)
Just start with the product and just make sure that the pricing is right. You know how to market it, you know how to sell it, and just get money to your account right away. Everything else is noise.
Roland Siebelink (22:33)
Tom, where can people reach you and is there anything they should download from your website?
Tom M (22:43)
Yes, you can reach me at tom@eqvista.com and if you reach out to me directly we can build one of the real-time valuation for you so you can see the stock price of your company in real time. We do it for free, just a few.
Yeah, tom@eqvista.com, happy to help with anything.
Roland Siebelink (23:15)
Cool. And if somebody knows me and doesn't know Tom yet, I'm always happy to provide an introduction as well, of course. Tom, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining the Scaling Without Breaking podcast. I'm sure the listeners will find it as fascinating as I did. And for the audience, thank you again for tuning in and we'll have another fascinating guest for you next week.
Tom M (23:38)
Thank you so much. Thank you everybody.