108 pointsby Eric_Gullichsenan hour ago15 comments
  • whall628 minutes ago
    You should sell your right to litigate this. There are hundreds of firms that would pay you to take this on. Would involve near zero effort for you and would also check the box of being “about the principle”.
    • rekttradera few seconds ago
      Absolutely this.
    • Legend244021 minutes ago
      Would they? Surely they'd realize that they too have no chance of winning because of the same issue.
    • pclmulqdq15 minutes ago
      There’s already a relatively liquid market here around legal financing, but they only finance cases that can win. This is not a case that will result in anything but a dismissal.
      • whall6a minute ago
        I am not a lawyer. If you are, then I will consider this response null and void… but if you’re not, just go to your LLM du jour and ask it why this case might have ground. If it is even 1% convincing then imagine what sort of case a real attorney could come up. Then multiply the odds of winning against a billion dollars. A >0.01% chance EV would probably catalyze at least one of these firms.
    • binlog17 minutes ago
      Why would anyone buy that right? Statute of limitations is crystal clear here. The case is going to be dismissed the moment it gets in front of a judge.
  • isatty6 minutes ago
    Way of my league here but if it starts with a B and they said sue them, why not go ahead and sue them?

    You’re not the only one who want to see this go somewhere.

  • lquist29 minutes ago
    Why does a stockholder have to reassert their rights to hold the stock that they already own?
    • s0rce21 minutes ago
      They don't own the stock as I understand it but never received options which they should have and would have been able to exercise. I assume they sold the remainder of the options long ago otherwise they have $3b in NVDA already and probably wouldn't have written this post.
    • whall624 minutes ago
      Plethora of reasons, but right to title is not as black and white as anyone assumes. There is no govt ledger that keeps track of who owns what, everything is always subject to interpretation. If you own a home, you likely had to purchase title insurance. If you don’t know what that’s for, look it up. It will give you the same answer to this question.
      • manwe15016 minutes ago
        Also seems like it isn’t clear that they ever owned it. There appears to be a mistake in the contract asserting mutually inconsistent clauses, but it appears that both parties agreed on the not-owning interpretation for nearly 30 years, which might already be a far simpler contract resolution (depending on jurisdiction, it can almost immediately binding as soon as both parties accent to that reading) than also having waited out the statute of limitations
    • binlog19 minutes ago
      They do not own the stock, because the options never vested and thus were never exercised. The time to assert that claim was 30 years ago.
      • acchow6 minutes ago
        > NVIDIA’s CFO wrote me a letter stating that 15,625 shares of my stock options had vested, and that I was required to exercise them. I did, and then forgot all about it.
        • binlog2 minutes ago
          Read the whole thing again. They aren’t complaining about the 15,625 shares (which they presumably sold a long time ago) but the remaining 25,000–15,625.
        • jcheng2 minutes ago
          Those shares were fine, it was the other 9,375 that were in question here.
  • phonon28 minutes ago
    Seems like you should sell your rights to the suit to a third party for a flat fee and percentage of recovery.
    • whall627 minutes ago
      Just commented the same thing and agree 100%.
      • tocs39 minutes ago
        What sort of law suit rights can be sold? This is a new concept for me. If I was hit by a Mack truck could I sell my rights to sue. It would seem to be a different type of case or are they both sort of the some. Injured by a truck vs. injured by you not holding up your end of the bargin?
        • phonon5 minutes ago
          Pretty much any lawsuit right can be sold, except for personal injury lawsuits, due to specific state restrictions for public policy reasons.
  • pugworthy8 minutes ago
    To satisfy the curious, "I have been everything, and nothing is worth it."

    Well quoted.

    • jadar4 minutes ago
      Thanks!
  • eadwu13 minutes ago
    Not sure how to feel about it.

    It seems like both you didn't caring about it during vesting or maybe they did a typo since it seems like you were vested over 4 years normally and the offer is over 4 years?

    Anyway if someone did this to me this is pretty much grounds for an irreparable relationship. Though I guess it was worth the attempt for $1b.

    • OsrsNeedsf2P2 minutes ago
      > if someone did this to me this is pretty much grounds for an irreparable relationship.

      If someone tried to claim what was contractually theirs?

  • wewewedxfgdf5 minutes ago
    Big mistake.

    These matters are not purely legal nor purely right and wrong.

    They are personal and political too.

    This is a fight you should have fought.

  • 29 minutes ago
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  • throw0317201918 minutes ago
    Don’t options expire (ex. Leaving the company)? How would this work thirty years later?
    • warmwaffles9 minutes ago
      If you exercise them, they are yours.
  • electriclove20 minutes ago
    So the shares he did receive are worth well over $1B too right?
    • whall617 minutes ago
      Probably sold them a long time ago.
  • goodmythicalan hour ago
    tl;dr

    OP was not given all of the shares earned at the time decades ago and didn't realize that they should've been payed out, but after engaging in a lawsuit realized that the court would likely not grant the case give the statute of limitations.

    Kinda like all the Sony game 'owners' not carefully reasing the legally binding contracts they're always signing realizing that they are not in fact purchasing a gauranteed lifetime access to the game.

    • klausa10 minutes ago
      I think that's an overly charitable reading.

      Whether they "earned" them is disputable — the offer letter specifies one vesting schedule (25% every year), the "cover sheet" from the options agreement specifies other (25% every _quarter_).

      So — the OP got the shares he was promised in the original offer letter; but later discovered that some of the documents he later got implied that the vesting schedule should be accelerated compared to what he agreed to.

      I think that is probably the funniest way possible to earn a billion dollars; but whether he's "owed" that money/shares, is... up for a debate.

    • fblp28 minutes ago
      Correction: The writer chose not to engage a lawsuit after receiving advice it was likely to be dismissed given 30 years had passed.
  • slopinthebag19 minutes ago
    this is like finding your harddrive with 13,000 bitcoin but it's encrypted and you forgot the password
  • an hour ago
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  • Eric_Gullichsenan hour ago
    Author here. I wanted to share this piece of personal and technical history from the early days of 3D graphics. The article covers the meeting on my houseboat with Jensen, Curtis, and Chris in 1993, working on biquadratic texture mapping for the NV1, and how Microsoft’s sudden pivot to triangles in DirectX nearly broke the company before their pivot to the RIVA 128. It also digs into the paperwork anomaly I recently uncovered regarding my Technical Advisory Board options and the vesting schedule. Happy to answer any technical questions about the early 90s VR/graphics scene or the NV1 era!
    • tims33a few seconds ago
      What was your gain on the 15,625 shares you did own? What year did you sell them?
    • NDlurker13 minutes ago
      How bad was the motion sickness back then and what kind of hardware were people using for the headsets?

      Did anything progress past tech demos?

    • triyambakam16 minutes ago
      The Kingdom of Tonga stood out to me. Are you still there? Why were you there? It's a very interesting place, especially for anyone not from there. I'm only adjacently aware as someone who spent most of my life in a different Polynesian country.
  • imadierich17 minutes ago
    [dead]