I recently got the opportunity to join Steve Preda on the Management Blueprint Podcast, and we spent most of the conversation on the question that sits at the centre of everything we do at Eqvista. How do you put a price on a company that has no revenue, no comparables, and no market to check itself against?
Here is the short version of what we covered.
Your valuation is already out of date
You close a round, you order a 409A, and a few weeks later a PDF arrives. Forty pages. Sixty sometimes. Buried in the middle is the one number that matters, the fair market value of your common stock. And the moment you open it, that number is describing a company that no longer exists.
One month old. Two months. Six.
In 2026, six months is not a lag. It is a different company.
I posted on Linkedin about SpaceX in April, when people were working off roughly $1.6 trillion. Two months later it was past $2.6 trillion. The multiple sits around 95x revenue, and for a comparable public company we would expect 6x, maybe 7x. Some of that is hype, I will not pretend otherwise. But part of it is that nobody else is putting spacecraft into orbit at that cadence, and the space economy will end up mirroring everything we already do down here.
Now ask what a six month old report tells you about a company moving like that. Nothing useful.
Public markets do not tolerate this. Something happens in Iran and a listed stock drops 10% before lunch. Private companies get a PDF twice a year and are expected to plan around it.
Five things we lean on
Steve asked me to keep the framework to five elements, which is a fair ask. So here it is.
Industry models. Sectors behave differently, so we do not force everything through one model.
Our own dataset. We have valued over $400 billion in client assets manually. Manually, before AI was in the picture. That is how we learned what holds up and what does not.
Public comps, properly selected. There are around 4,000 listed companies. Choosing the right handful is most of the work.
Your actual numbers. Every valuation we run starts with the company’s own cap table and financials, not an estimate of what we think they look like. Guessing at inputs is where most platforms cut the corner, and it shows up in the output.
Human analysts. Close to 20 in house, with dual masters, CVA, CFA Level 3 and NACVA credentials. A number you cannot defend is not a valuation, it is a guess. When a client goes into M&A and the buy side challenges the price, someone has to stand behind it.
What we are building next
We now price around $4 trillion in private company equity on a continuous basis, across 25,000+ companies. Scale is not the interesting part though. Adoption is. Getting the market to expect a live valuation the same way it expects a live stock price.
So we are becoming our own client. Controlled tender offers first, then a secondary marketplace, with an ATS application eight to ten months out. Issue the stock, manage it and finally give shareholders somewhere to actually sell it.
Listen to the full conversation with Steve Preda on the Management Blueprint Podcast.
