What we talked about
Tom Milar shares how he’s building Equista, a platform for equity management and valuations:and why he believes the private markets need better pricing infrastructure before liquidity can truly scale. Tom explains how the company evolved from stock issuance and cap table administration into a valuation engine that aims to price private companies in real time, from early-stage startups to unicorns.
Show notes
Tom Milar has one pointed observation for founders who are excited about raising money: ending up with 35 percent ownership of your own company is “a disaster,” and most founders arrive there by giving equity away too easily, too early. His companies exist partly because he got tired of seeing that pattern repeat across thousands of cap tables.
What we covered
- Equista has grown from basic stock issuance and cap table administration into what Tom believes is one of the largest private company valuation engines on the market, currently valuing over $5 billion in client assets monthly and targeting $6–7 trillion in real-time valuations of unicorn-stage companies within months.
- Tom’s core advice to founders is “money first, always”:he describes a simple rule where if you have 500 emails to send but a missed call from someone ready to pay $7,000 for your service, you call that person back first. All his companies have been cash-flow positive as a result.
- Cheqly (his neobank for startups) was built on the AML compliance infrastructure Equista developed in-house to serve clients in Hong Kong, which grew to match bank-level anti-money-laundering standards. That infrastructure earned them MSO licensing approval in Hong Kong in 2020.
- The long-term vision connects both companies: Equista sets a real-time price for private company shares, and Cheqly provides the payment rails so shareholders can actually transact:cash for equity:without routing through third-party systems.
- Hong Kong was Tom’s proving ground: he describes starting a company there as a “business shock” because company formation took as little as one hour and the AML regulatory environment was far more sophisticated than anything he’d encountered before.
- Tom draws on Jaromir Jagr as a framework for resilience: hard moments happen to everyone, including competitors, and the founders who know how to get through them faster are the ones who win.
About Tom Milar
Tom Milar is the founder and CEO of Equista, a stock management and valuation platform serving over 2,000 companies with $270 billion in assets under administration, and the co-founder of Cheqly, a neobank providing business accounts and cards for startups. He has built and sold companies across the US, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasmilar
- Website: https://eqvista.com
Episode 109 of the PreVetted Podcast.