Tomas Milar and the price of owning something

An internship rejection usually ends with an awkward email and a small adjustment to one’s ambitions. Tomas Milar eventually acquired the company. IncParadise, the American incorporation business that had declined to take him on, became part of his own business interests in 2017. Asked about the reversal, he sounded rather pleased: “And I acquired that company. Isn’t that crazy?”

It is an excellent dinner-party story. It also risks hiding the more useful part. Milar already knew the business. He had built Startupr in Hong Kong, helping entrepreneurs establish companies, and had worked with IncParadise for years. The acquisition joined related operations in two markets. Revenge would have been a rather expensive explanation for a transaction that made commercial sense.

The Czech founder, now based in San Francisco, has spent much of his career around the machinery that makes other people’s businesses possible. Incorporation. Accounting. Banking. Ownership records. These subjects rarely receive the glamorous end of the startup vocabulary. They do, however, become terribly interesting when something goes wrong.

A train south, and a business in the paperwork

Before Hong Kong came an education spread across borders. Milar completed a master’s programme at Mendel University in Brno in 2010, writing about Škoda Auto’s strategic decisions in China. He also studied Chinese management in Brussels. His recollection of student life included a week with academic obligations in Turkey, Brno and Finland. A quiet semester was evidently someone else’s ambition.

After working for a lobbying business in Brussels, he moved to Asia in 2010. Beijing came first. Within months, he concluded that getting his business going there would take too long. He boarded a train for Hong Kong, where he began building. The move had a practical attraction: an English-speaking business environment and a legal system he found easier to navigate.

Startupr followed in 2011. The proposition was plain enough to fit on a form: help customers create a company online. Behind that apparently simple transaction sat documents, compliance work and the recurring obligations that arrive after the congratulatory handshake. Milar’s business stayed around for those obligations. A company’s birth certificate was the beginning of the customer relationship.

He has described his early commercial ambition in unusually unromantic terms: “Solid foundation to generate long-term income.” The sentence has the glamour of a well-maintained boiler. It also explains a good deal. Recurring services produced cash, experience and conversations with founders. Each conversation offered a close view of the next administrative problem waiting to be solved.

The meeting that consumed two days

There was a less orderly experiment alongside the incorporation business. Milar went into telecommunications, trading connections between international destinations. The economics depended on routes and volume; the work depended on relationships. Clients and partners pulled him into a business whose operating habits were quite different from those of an online company-formation service.

In his account, a single meeting in Taiwan could consume two days of travel from Hong Kong. The company was sold after two years. He later contrasted that experience with a service customers could buy by completing a form. His preference is easy to appreciate: a purchase button is usually more punctual than a connecting flight.

The point was never that people were dispensable. His operating ideal was to begin close to the work, learn the product, then hire people better at its separate tasks. He dislikes activity that interrupts building without bringing the business closer to a paying customer. Product and marketing get the attention; ceremonial busyness gets a colder reception.

“Solid foundation to generate long-term income.”

Tomas Milar, on a successful business model

Owning the company that said no

By the time he acquired IncParadise, Milar had a reason to value familiarity. Startupr had worked with its American counterpart for nearly seven years. IncParadise had been founded by John Vanhara as EastBiz.com in 1999, initially in software, before moving into company services. Milar’s 2018 description of the deal emphasised how well he knew what he was buying.

There is a pattern here worth following. Milar moved between countries and industries, but repeatedly returned to customers who needed help getting businesses established and keeping them functioning. The paperwork supplied a kind of map. Once a company existed, it needed accounting. Once it had shareholders, somebody needed an accurate record of their interests.

That accumulated experience gave him a different starting point from a founder looking for an industry to enter. He had already seen entrepreneurs wrestling with ownership spreadsheets and administrative work. Eqvista, founded in 2018, grew out of those encounters. Its first territory was the cap table: the record of who owns which pieces of a company.

The spreadsheet has consequences

A cap table can look wonderfully harmless when there are two founders and a few entries. Time changes its character. Financing rounds arrive. Employees receive options. People leave. Securities carry different terms. The record becomes an accumulation of decisions, some made years before the person currently responsible for it joined the company.

Milar’s concern is the quiet period between headline events. A financing brings lawyers, investors and scrutiny. Ordinary months bring smaller changes that still need recording. His test for choosing a platform is whether a founder would trust it during financing or due diligence. A handsome interface has limited charm when the ownership underneath it is wrong.

The employee sees another version of the problem. A stock option is a promise with conditions, and explaining those conditions is part of making the promise meaningful. Milar has pointed to complexity and communication as recurring weaknesses in employee ownership plans. Eqvista’s tools organise participation, vesting and ownership information so that administrators and employees have something firmer to work with.

This is where the apparently dry subject acquires a human plot. A founder is trying to recruit. An employee is weighing an offer. An investor wants to understand a stake. All three may use the same word, equity, while carrying quite different assumptions about what it means. Orderly records give that conversation a place to begin.

A price with several answers

Milar’s attention has increasingly shifted from recording ownership to understanding its value. Eqvista combines equity management with valuation work, including 409A valuations. His argument is that a private company’s last fundraising announcement tells only part of its pricing story. Different securities, rights and transactions can produce different values for interests in the same business.

That makes the dream of a private-company stock ticker more complicated than putting a large number on a screen. A financing price, an employee-equity valuation and a secondary sale can answer different questions. Milar wants the relationships between those answers to become easier to explain. Updating the number is useful only if people understand what the number describes.

In September 2026, Eqvista was described as serving more than 25,000 companies, with its real-time valuation engine covering approximately $9 trillion in company value. Those are two different measures: platform customers and the value covered by valuation models. The second describes the engine’s scope. It is separate from Eqvista’s own corporate value and from money held for customers.

Milar’s ambition extends to structured opportunities for shareholders to sell. He has described company-controlled tender offers, with decisions about participation, timing, price and terms. A frequently refreshed estimate could help inform that process. A completed transaction still requires willing participants and an agreed structure. Even a very industrious model cannot shake hands on behalf of both sides.

Leave a person responsible for the number

Automation occupies an interesting place in this project. Milar wants faster analysis, yet continues to make the case for certified valuation analysts. In discussing AI and valuation, he stresses expert oversight and the trust involved when a customer relies on a result. Speed is one part of a service that must also survive questions.

That position fits a career spent near compliance and business administration. The person buying a valuation may need to explain it to someone else. Producing an answer quickly does not finish the job. Someone has to understand the inputs, explain the method and take responsibility for the work. Software inherits some decidedly human obligations when its output travels into important decisions.

Cheqly, his business-banking venture, approaches a neighbouring difficulty: giving startups access to banking services online. Milar has described a broader ambition that runs from incorporation through banking and equity management. The common customer is recognisable throughout. Someone is trying to build a company and would prefer the administrative systems to help rather than monopolise the afternoon.

The customer gets a vote

Milar’s preference for building with customer revenue has remained a recurring theme. He used proceeds from earlier businesses to get Eqvista going. His public position on funding also allows room for outside capital once a business has demonstrated demand. The sequence matters to him: learn what customers buy, establish momentum, then decide what additional money could accelerate.

There is a useful restraint beneath the scale of his current ambitions. A business that sells practical services gets frequent verdicts. Does the customer sign up? Can they complete the task? Do they return? A grand theory of private markets has to pass through those small encounters. Milar has spent years collecting them, one incorporation, account or ownership problem at a time.

The rejected internship makes a satisfying opening because it supplies a tidy reversal. His work since then is less tidy and more revealing. Helping someone create a company leads to questions about ownership; ownership leads to value; value leads to the possibility of a sale. Milar keeps following the next question. The paperwork, it turns out, has a surprisingly long plot.