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!

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.

Long story, but HM George V and I were good friends and business partners in some ventures. Most significant of which was the commercialization of the .TO ccTLD, in 1997, the first to compete with .COM. Do a search on my name and Tonga for details.

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?

Frame rates were low because of limited rendering speed and tracker lag. I did a lot of VR demos starting in 1989 at Autodesk. Not much motion sickness, perhaps 2% of users. The first HMD we used at Sense8 was by Virtual Research (Bruce Bassett) with LEEP optics. And I just found out that John Ternus worked for Bruce. Small planet.

What was your gain on the 15,625 shares you did own? What year did you sell them?

Do you still program for fun ?

I’m in a small game dev group and I very much enjoy seeing how older engineers tackle problems.

Yes. I do a lot of embedded systems things and recently some agentic auto-improvement with local LLMs on a strix halo. "Older Engineers".

I was in on the ground floor of WiFi, in that around 1995 I did a significant chuck of the work that proved that WiFi works, and my work at a university lead to the formation of a company that put WiFi into the market (Radiata). The IP situation was murky. A patent holder made about $1b and the company sold for $560m (in 2000). I gather the university complained and got a good chunk of "go away" money. I could have thrown my hat in the ring: maybe I would have got something, maybe I wouldn't have. Either way, I walked away, as I judged it wasn't worth the non-financial cost. 30 years layer I still think I made the right decision. I might have been living in a nicer house, but I wouldn't have the life I have today, which I am happy with.

I don't know your situation in life, but if your experience is anything like mine I reckon you've probably made the right decision.

Usually the university takes half of any funds, faculty takes half, and whatever is left over is split between the associated academics.

You were lucky, as most university contracts clearly state they own all associated IP created while working on campus. They could have legally given you $0, and end of employment notice. These things can get messy fast. =3

You lived on a houseboat named SS Vallejo in Sausalito...

Any chance it was THE Vallejo where Alan Watts lived, and the grateful dead once played? Or maybe she was just named in homage?

Either way, it's very cool! Thanks for the great read.

Yes, the S.S. Vallejo. Formerly owned by Jean Varda and Alan Watts. I lived there from 1990 until 2023.

I bet that was something! I just re-watched one of the Watts videos he filmed on the Vallejo a few weeks ago.

I imagine that living in a place with that sort of history was the kind of experience one can't really convey in a few words online, but if you have written about it (or intend to) I would certainly love to read more.

In 1989 I was consulting for a large company in NYC that hired you to give our small UI/UX team a demo of your VR system. I still remember strapping on the headset and looking around the virtual world. I might even have your business card somewhere!

I seem to recall that large company was Citibank, and that they were surprisingly open to the strange new tech of VR. Though perhaps there were other large NY firms with small UX groups I demoed to...

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.

Why does a stockholder have to reassert their rights to hold the stock that they already own?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seems like you should sell your rights to the suit to a third party for a flat fee and percentage of recovery.

Just commented the same thing and agree 100%.

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?

Who in their right mind would buy a case that’s past the statute of limitations?

Half of HN, it sounds like.

Yes, I have to say, I'm a bit surprised (and disappointed) by how many people in this thread are struggling with their reading comprehension of the story.

It's a fun story, but that's all. There's absolutely no legal case here.

Reading comprehension != being a lawyer

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”.

Would they? Surely they'd realize that they too have no chance of winning because of the same issue.

Unless the options grant had specific language of an expiry period I would gather there's a very good chance of a large payout. I don't know why you wouldn't go after closure of this if you found yourself in the same scenario. Many legal agreements are simply a percentage of winnings and no payments otherwise. Seems pretty obvious to take that route.

"no chance" can still be 1/1000 which is ~1 million

the lawyers cost more

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.

Out of curiosity, why do you think you know that?

https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/civil-lawsuit/statute-limitat...

Breach of a written contract: 4 years from the date the contract was broken.

Which part do you think is debatable?

Not sure; I didn't go to law school.

This part:

Sometimes, if the problem (like the injury or damage) was not discovered right away, the statute of limitations generally starts counting from the date the problem was discovered or should reasonably have been discovered, whichever comes first.

I think you may be right but also may be wrong. If that was indeed the case, they wouldn't have to respond to him for a whole year. nVidia knew they screwed up back in 1996, but was 100% uncertain like you are. There is 5-10% chance that a judge would accept this on the basis that this was grossly incompetently misrepresented in 1996 and OP actually has some ground for suing. There is serious financial loss here. If I received 1000 shares from Meta for my work during my full time employee and then keep thinking I had 1000 shares invested for 30 years, but turns out no I do not, that's a big loss!

It’s the other way round. For 30 years he has happily believed that he received 16k shares. Now he learns that he was owed another 7k at the time but neither party in the transaction noticed and he wants them to pay the difference now.

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.

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.

Absolutely this.

After much soul-searching, deliberation, and gnashing of teeth, my attorneys and I concluded that the statute of limitations was against us. Because of the thirty-odd years that had passed while I “sat on my rights,” it seemed unlikely we’d make it past a motion to dismiss.

That was my first thought as well.

I doubt it for three very big reasons and you're wrong about one big point:

1. Time barring is pretty iron clad. Sucks for the author but consider the alternative where anyone could sue anyone after any period of time.

2. If a court did find in favor of the plaintiff, the court would be more likely to award the 90s cash value of the stock, plus interest, rather than awarding the shares or current market value (damages being how he was actually wronged in the 90s rather than speculating what he might have done with the stock to present)

3. Given 1 and 2, Nvidia is unlikely to make a big settlement, meaning an expensive and risky trial.

Which brings us to hidden reason #4: nobody would pay that much for the rights so it probably isn't worth the author's time. He'd still be the man at the center of the suit: depositions, testimony, cross examination, records subpoenas...

but consider the alternative where anyone could sue anyone after any period of time

What's the problem with this alternative, exactly? Some crimes already have no statute of limitations, and this hasn't caused the sky to fall.

It would create a burden on businesses to keep all records indefinitely (most businesses only keep around 7 years of most records). This has a monetary cost to it that would disadvantage mature businesses against younger ones.

In an era of digital records keeping, this does not sound impossible.

Yeah I never understand this idea that “if you avoid getting caught long enough, you deserve to enjoy the spoils of your crime.”

1. The state generally has more resources to retain evidence than citizens; if the state is allowed to prosecute crimes far in the past, they can target defendants who cannot provide evidence in their defense due to lost records. This asymmetry can be unjust, especially for crimes of lesser impact.

2. Most people draw a line where it seems needlessly cruel to prosecute an old crime; an extreme example, should a middle-aged person with decades of good behavior live in fear of being prosecuted for a relatively small crime committed as a teenager? Conversely, if a person commits a crime as a teenager, shouldn't they have clemency if they stop committing crimes for a long time and become a good citizen? Most people prefer the outcome that people can put smaller mistakes behind them; they may debate where to draw the lines, of course.

So the shares he did receive are worth well over $1B too right?

Don’t options expire (ex. Leaving the company)? How would this work thirty years later?

If you exercise them, they are yours.

If you’ve exercised them, you’ve essentially bought the stock at that price and own it. Most people just sell them right away because they’re more interested in the payment on the difference between option price and current price. But you technically could exercise/buy it and just hold.

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.

if someone did this to me this is pretty much grounds for an irreparable relationship.

If someone tried to claim what was contractually theirs?

If they did not complain when they were sent the letter (of vesting) either they did not care about the stock or was under the same assumption they were that is over 4 years.

Of course, contracts are legally binding, but that's completely different from my perception / evaluation of someone - if the mutual understanding was over 4 years and then 30 years later you find the typo and come back to bite me then yes it is 100% an irreparable relationship.

Yes I would think better of them if they came back to bite if NVIDIA was a penny stock but probably nobody would bite them back if they found out it was worth $100 instead of $1B.

To be clear, the grant is the legally binding document regardless of intent (initial offer + vesting seems to imply 4 years), I would eat the typo if it was 30 years ago and chalk it off as a learned mistake (assuming it wasn't company altering), although I would still think less of them for fleecing.

In general, most founding staff with lucrative contracts, are often pushed out just before an IPO. Doesn't matter if you were friends, worked 60 hour weeks building the company for years, or name is on the company patents.

A bit of cash can turn folks into awful people, and some contracts are just a obfuscated legal con of the naive. =3

To satisfy the curious, "I have been everything, and nothing is worth it."

Well quoted.

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.

Litigation is expensive, and the OP knows that the statute of limitations is against them, so it'll likely turn out to be an even more expensive lesson.

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.

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I bought a cup of coffee for ~10.5 Bitcoin back in April 2011.

Where did it come from? Well, I was curious how Bitcoin worked, so I set up a little mining rig and let it run at night on my work computer. So, other than my time, which I think I did on work's time, and the power, which I think I used work's power... I saw it as a free cup of coffee.

Honestly, I was just so happy to find a booth at a convention that actually took Bitcoin that I didn't mind the crappy exchange rate.

But anyway, I don't think regret is a particularly useful thing to hold onto. You can regret things you did, and you can regret things you didn't do. Either way, there's nothing you can do about it. It feels like baggage. Hold on to too much of it and you sink. You have to find a way to rise above it and keep moving forward. If you don't, you'll drown.

I say that as someone who learned this lesson the hard way.

I spent 3+ years in a legal battle with an insurance company and their contractor that ultimately cost me more than $500,000. I was right. Period. I had been wronged. Period. The contractor and insurance company both lied and I had ample documentation of them doing so, and doing shoddy work. What I was asking for was completely reasonable. But who cares? That's not how the courts or the legal system work.

What I learned from the process was that most people just get screwed over when they go up against big companies. And it's not even close. I'd guess something like 75% of people who get into a fight with an insurance company end up losing -- and it's probably higher than that if you factor in the people who simply give up. Eventually, you have to decide whether continuing to fight is worth what it's costing you.

There will always be another "I almost caught the fish!" story to tell. Life is long. Learn from the mistakes, let go of the things you can't change, and do your best to keep moving forward.

Some situations just suck. Best not to think about it them too much.

You are ultimately responsible for asserting your contractual rights. Your stock options had an expiry and you did not exercise them in time. The letter you received notifying that you had 15,625 vested options was not an award in of itself, it was only a courtesy notifying you that you had vested options to exercise before they expired. Even if due to ambiguous wording it could be argued that 25,000 options had vested at the time instead of 15,625, that was only relevant until the options expired. You needed to assert your rights to the [additional 9,375] vested options before they expired. So, this issue died in 1996.

I had a similar experience although over a shorter time horizon. I was in a dispute with a corporation which prompted me to pore over every word in every previously signed agreement. I discovered, due to an obvious typo in a stock option agreement, more options had vested than had been intended. After some pushback, they eventually relented and awarded me the options.

Given the amount of money involved, it was worth engaging lawyers to see if NVIDIA would pay you some money to save the hassle of dealing with it, but there is and was zero prospect of this ever being awarded in your favor by a court since the options expired.

The article states that they exercised their options.

No, it doesn't.

https://colo.to/exercise.pdf

They exercised 15,625 options of the 25,000. The OP sent $781.25 to NVIDIA. The remaining 9,375 options were not exercised, they expired 90 days after April 16th 1996.

Only in hindsight, 30 years later, has the OP realized that the other 9,375 had vested due to ambiguous wording in the agreement. The article is about the 9,375 that were not exercised.

So 15,625 were exercised.

Yeah. The issue being that at the time both the CFO and their external counsel Cooley told me in writing that 15,625 shares had vested. Those representations were incorrect. And I (quite reasonably) replied on them rather than checking the original documents. Which I did only 30+ years later. In legal terms, the CFO Gani’s 1996 letter is a negligent misrepresentation, a species of fraud under Cal. Civ. Code § 1709-1710.

I'm no expert, but did your lawyers clarify if a statute of limitation start from the date you learned there might be a discrepancy, instead of all those years ago?

While no one's hands might be clean in this, at the end of the day the party with the resources and expertise is equipped differently.

It might not hurt to get some more opinions even if they end up in the same place.

What happened to 15,625 shares you did exercise? I guess they are worth over $1.5 billion as of today?

He's saying they didn't actually get exercised as-in stock was never made his. They took the money and didn't issue him the shares, but the statue of limitations is gone on the fraud.

No that’s not what’s being said. Nvidia gave him the wrong total. He paid for that total. He’s saying there’s a world in which he is owed the other 9k shares. He put some lawyers on it and it turns out it won’t be this world.

I've never been on either side of one of situations, but if the company is doing well, why doesn't the company just take care of the human? These don't really seem like opening-the-flood-gates types of decisions and companies could just choose to do if they wanted to, right?

You don't see the risk that is created when you allow unexercised options get called at a later date, when they're in the money, because the company is 'doing well'?

No, I guess I don't. The companies can choose to do what they want and I think they can make a different decision based on how well they are doing. I don't know. They don't have to, but I don't see why they couldn't.

If that were the case, why would anyone pay to exercise options ever again?

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Not taking about $5k or even $5m. A billion dollars is a hell if a lot of money.

The shares are worth what their worth. People would have lost their minds and then everyone would have moved on. Is NVIDIA filled with more billion dollar typos? I don't think so, but I wouldn't care if it was.

Author here. Thanks for all the comments, I've been hesitant to post this to the court of public opinion, yet curiosity about what the HN community would think caused me to push the button. My lawyers - who were really excellent - represented me (on contingency!) because it seemed the chance of a judge not accepting a motion to dismiss (for a variety of reasons I don't want to detail here) was non-zero. And the process of discovery would be very costly for NVIDIA with depositions from many executives who have better things to do.

It was a great read and I am inspired by your stoic philosophy and it's sort of amazing that I can just talk to you via Hackernews :-D

but aside from that, a question I and many are wondering,

1.) is there a surefire guarantee that the case would be dismissed by court or that there is just a low chance of it being done.

Because if Nvidia knows this, then they are saying so sue us as a way to do just that (deterring you), but if the statute of limitations don't particularly apply though (as some have suggested here), then isn't litigation still a good path?

Also, instead of litigating with your own money, I imagine that there must be a market for cases like these who can litigate for you and win a portion of the money as well without requiring litigation fees from you. (A lot of hackernews comments are about this)

At best: you actually win money. At worst: you don't (but that's where you currently are), so perhaps there's still a reason to try.

IANAL and you have contacted top lawyers, (so please correct me if I am wrong as I usually am.)

2: how do you feel about the whole situation? I imagine not everyone has sort of even the possibility of becoming almost an billionaire. Also, do you believe that there could be other people like you as well where because of some technicality/(statute of limitations), they too didn't get the money/stocks?

3: What are the life lessons that you would like to give to the next generation?

It's still so impressive to me that I can just ask questions to you on hackernews just like that, thanks for taking the time to read it and have a nice day, kind sir!

(1) Not a certainty that it would be dismissed. Just a high enough likelihood that after hundreds of hours or work with my lawyers (who were excellent) and many rounds of letters and meetings with NVIDIA counsel - all very professional - it wasn't worth our time to pursue further. I have other things to do with my brief adventure on this planet. (2) Feel? At this point just sort of amused by it all. (3) Read the contracts. Carefully. In 1996 NVIDIA was 3 years before IPO and nearly bankrupt, and I was busy. Too busy to read the contracts.

Read the contracts. Carefully.

May I use your example if I give a talk at some point trying to impress upon the audience why they should actually read agreements before they sign them?

It's already out there. You don't need to ask.

It’s considerate, polite, to ask instead of assuming the author would be ok with that

What happened to the $1.7 billion of shares that you did get by exercising your options?

This is my question. The post states “I received a call that all options had vested so I need to exercise them, so I did”.

Ok? So the author should have those shares to his name?

Clearly he sold them early, and would have sold these extra ones too if he'd exercised them. It's just weird that he's trying to hide the fact by failing to mention it and ignoring questions about it.

It's OK, dude. We've all been there. You're in good company with Masayoshi Son on this one.

Yeah I noticed the author is replying to a lot of questions except the question of what happened to the shares that were exercised

Thanks for sharing your story in straightforward detail. Do you believe, in an ethical sense (independent of the legal sense), that you are owed roughly a billion dollars?

It sounds like you were rather negligent as well. You didn't care to have any inkling of memory of the vesting schedule in 1996, or just to double check and "wrap up" the financial details of that agreement after the work was done?

It does seem somewhat suspect to elide mention of what became of the shares that you did own, and that you only re-noticed Nvidia in 2024. Every 14 year old PC nerd/gamer knew that name in 2001. It is quite a feat of negligence to wait that long to dig this up.

You seem like a decent person, and I do believe that you are justly owed something, but I must admit that I find this to be a depressing tale of rich people spinning wheels for naught. A modest inflation-adjusted multiple of the original value of the options seems reasonable.

Before anyone accuses me of shilling or white-knighting for a major corporation, I don't have any broader sympathy for them and I would generally take the side of David over Goliath, which I think some commenters are making this out to be, but it seems more like Mini-Goliath and Mega-Goliath are bikeshedding and David has no stake in the matter.

Ethically? Difficult question. I may not be a decent person as you posit, but I do like to think of myself as reasonable. I certainly never expected NVIDIA to say "aw shucks" and write me a billion dollar check. At the last lawyer meeting we proposed to settle for a far smaller number, which both sides agreed was reasonable. A number not picked out of a hat, but based on rather complex nuances such as the likelihood I would have sold etc.etc. derived from much legal thought. And they still made the call to say nope. I think it is perfectly clear from the options contract what the vesting term was. And certainly I erred in not realizing this earlier, before the statute of limitations tolled. Though in 1996 the stock was priced at 5 cents, so not something I paid enough attention to, not having the foresight or perhaps the necessary faith in Jensen's perseverance, intelligence, and luck. Hindsight is cheap.

If I were you I would refrain from offering thoughts like this publicly. You don't want to hav any of this used against you.

It is clear he has decided to not pursue this any further.

A modest inflation-adjusted multiple of the original value of the options seems reasonable.

But why? The OP (apparently) owns some of Nvidia. It seems reasonable to get that ownership recognised.

While not a letter of the law argument, there's a spirit of the law argument here that comes from the ideas like adverse posession and the statute of limitations. The OP didn't use or even worry about the options/shares for 30 some years: the time to speak up and assert ownership was literal decades ago.

If someone has built a house on a remote lot you claim to own, while making property improvements and paying taxes, but you've never visited for 30 years; are you really entitled to swoop in and seize their house now?

I dont think the land ownership analogy is quite as simple as you're making it out to be, given that the US and many other countries are literally founded on "someone else's land" and the entire Palestine / Israel issue.

The US is not founded on 'someone else's land'. Small portions of the US perhaps, yes, and treaties and courts work through that. Most Indians were hunter/gatherers, and suggesting that because someone roves through massive tracts of land is ownership, is beyond weird.

Seasonal camping sites make sense, more from a 'our land' perspective.

And naturally any signed treaties should be honoured.

You may say "But, they were here first!", yet that's quite false. Native Americans invaded as well, either subsuming or slaughtering existing populations as they did so. Further, Native Americans warred, fought, killed each other, just as Europeans, Middle Easterners, and everyone else on the planet did. After all, human is human is human, and that's (sadly) what humans do.

And if you look at every other country on the planet, the precise same is true. Locals pushed aside as newcomers invaded, whether the UK, Scotland, Russia, Germany, the Middle East, literally every place on the planet.

There is no peoples, no country, no ethic group, which has not over time invaded another.

There is no one alive today, that does not stand on land once called 'home' by another.

You may wonder why I say this, but instead of discussing a land plot inside a Western country taken over by another citizen, you immediately dove into Native American rights and a Middle Eastern conflict for some inexplicable reason.

Most Indians were hunter/gatherers, and suggesting that because someone roves through massive tracts of land is ownership, is beyond weird.

It is not "beyond weird." It is a well-defended position in contemporary political theory and it has had many prominent defenders for hundreds of years. For example, in the 1790s, Immanuel Kant wrote:

It can still be asked whether, when neither nature nor chance but just our own will brings us into the neighborhood of a people that holds out no prospect of a civil union with it, we should not be authorized to found colonies, by force if need be, in order to establish a civil union with them and bring these human beings (savages) into a rightful condition (as with the American Indians, the Hottentots and the inhabitants of New Holland); or (which is not much better), to found colonies by fraudulent purchase of their land, and so become owners of their land, making use of our superiority without regard for their first possession. Should we not be authorized to do this, especially since nature itself (which abhors a vacuum) seems to demand it, and great expanses of land in other parts of the world, which are now splendidly populated, would have otherwise remained uninhabited by civilized people or, indeed, would have to remain forever uninhabited, so that the end of creation would have been frustrated? But it is easy to see through this veil of injustice (Jesuitism), which would sanction any means to good ends. Such a way of acquiring land is therefore to be repudiated.

I see no relevance in your quoted text, with respect to what I said in my post. And the premise I cited is indeed beyond weird.

Note that I said seasonal camping sites make sense. And I said treaties make sense. I simply said 'wandering about' doesn't convey ownership, aka 'possession'. To take such a notion to the extreme, imagine a grouping of 4 who rove all around the entirety of Canada and the US through their lifetime. You could easily do this over 20 to 30 years. Should those 4 be attributed possession? As owners of that entire landmass via treaty, or just prevent any use of that land by anyone else?

Absurd. And it is equally absurd that land used for travel between two campsites, basically as a road, should mysteriously convey ownership/possession too.

For example, typically there were winter and summer camp sites in the US. Yet when not doing so, Natives would often 'rove' from one of the other, think 'migration'. Yet I've seen ridiculous assertions that someone basically using the land as a road between two campsites, to conveys ownership. Sheer nonsense.

Under contract law, should the treaties be honored if the other party weren’t capable of full understanding of what they were signing? I agree with you, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

This is a complex and nuanced point, but there is complexity and such nuance elsewhere, too. For example, I often see "trillions of dollars of $city land are in dispute!" then citing that a settlement of immense magnitude should result.

Of course, the land in question was effectively open forest/plains, isolated with no cities and almost no one living on or around it. And if it remained as so, by todays standards, would be worth often dollars per acre. Meanwhile, we're attributing dollar amounts to land which only became valuable, because it was developed by some means.

While I am not directly answering your question, I frankly find the 'cut off' period to be quite weird. Everyone on the planet has ancestors which have been displaced, AND have displaced peoples. We're both the conquerors and the conquered. For example, I have Scottish heritage. Where's the payment for the land the English stole from my ancestors? And for the English, where's the payment that the Romans owe, for the land taken from those in the isles 2k years ago? Or the French owe, when they invaded and hung out for a while?

Individuals were displaced, entire groupings of people slaughter or literally decimated.

It goes on and on and on, back through time, all owing all. Yet that is completely ignored, including endless land grabs all over the planet even over the last 2 centuries, but... oh well, significant compensation and land returns are only really given to those in North America.

I believe in fairness. And to me, this seems... off somehow.

You understand expected value right?

I'm not mathemagician, but a tiny fraction of a billion with a b dollars is worth filing.

If nothing else it gives us all an exciting news cycle.

Expected value usually assumes these things happen in isolation, and they don't. They are good at representing the isolated upside, but rarely do they account for the downside.

In this case a 1% chance of $1bn represents an expected value of $10m. If you accept the cost of litigation as $10m (for example), then your expected value is actually zero. And if you think about the outcomes of the 99% of cases, bankruptcy is hugely painful.

One can always play silly games with expected value. If the "value" of a human life is $10m (supposedly a figure used by some governments), you could pose all sorts of expected value scenarios, but when it's your life that all goes out of the window.

yea my thought exactly. especially if the lawsuit expenses are on contingency, what is there to lose by filing?

I don't understand how your name could not have been carried along on the cap table all these years. In my experience when I've made an investment in an early stage company and they have a liquidity event, they come looking for me.

Your blog post is making a logical error. You're assuming that you're being owed the right to exercise your options retroactively so you calculate the foregone value of the stock you could have had if you exercised, which is dishonest because they can only deliver expired options to you.

You could still sue Nvidia for compensation, assuming no statue of limitations, but the thing you can be compensated for is a completely different thing. You can still be compensated the value of the option. I.e. the difference between the strike price and the market price 30 years ago. That's the thing you can sue for. You cannot retroactively extend the option because longer duration options have a higher premium so you would be telling Nvidia to pay you more money than they contractually obligated themselves.

Are you a lawyer?

Are you going to ask this question to everyone who writes anything in this discussion?

It's beside the point whether he's a lawyer. He's not your lawyer, that's for sure. The "no medical nor legal advice but otherwise you can advise anything" idea is beyond stupid.

Judge advice on its merit, not by what category it's in.

Knowing whether a lawyer believes a legal theory helps judge the merit of that theory, because civil law conventions are what lawyers (including judges) believe.

It's the internet, anyone can say they're a lawyer. If you take legal advice from an internet stranger because they say they're a lawyer, well i might have a bridge to sell you

Fun fact: it's a crime to say you're a lawyer if you aren't one.

I don't have the same story but I did turn down a job offer from Nvidia in '97 which I think about from time to time.

As a 14 year old in 1995 I advised family to put the proceeds from the sale of a house into Microsoft stock, which based on a cursory search would have ended up as some absurd number. One online calculator I'm looking at says $204,000 of stock in 1994 would be $41.2 million today after multiple splits and increase in share value. But nobody takes investment advice from 14 year olds who've spent too much time reading USENET and talking to people on IRC.

Even if they'd only put a fraction of it into MSFT and held it until only 2003 or 2004 it would have been far more than enough to retire on comfortably.

When i was 7 in 1997 my parents had a little stock ticker widget on their desktop that showed how much their stock investments were worth. Obviously it was a long time ago but I remember often seeing MSFT going red. I didn't know much about anything at the time but I knew that the windows machine i were playing on was made by Microsoft. So I asked my mom what red means and she said it means the company is not doing well and they will sell it. I remember saying something like "but Microsoft is on every computer at school I think you should buy more"

But no one listens to a 7 year old about investments! (Nor should they in most cases, i think i told her to buy more yahoo too)

I dont know how much they held or how much they sold, or if they even sold at all, just a fun memory triggered by your comment:)

as a 13 year old i wanted my mom to take 50 bucks from my summer job to take into btc. BTC was at .06 cent back at the time. Even if i just held it until BTC reached 20$, i wouldnt be working 9-5 right now but rather 9-1.

And the process of discovery would be very costly for NVIDIA with depositions from many executives who have better things to do.

You're almost certainly either misrepresenting or misunderstanding what your attorneys told you.

You would never get to discovery with your complaint. If you sued, NVIDIA would win a motion to dismiss in federal court based on your claim being time-barred.

You have no basis to support decades-long tolling. The possibility that, say, NVIDIA knew what it told you was wrong 30 years ago is not good enough under federal pleading standards to get you to discovery. You would need sufficient evidence to support a claim that NVIDIA intentionally lied, which you obviously don't have otherwise you would have mentioned it in your post.

State court (California) has a few wrinkles but the result ends up being the same.

Basically the legal system is designed to prevent fishing expeditions on decades-old claims. You cannot have possession of an agreement and then run to the courts asking for a billion dollars because you failed for three decades to read it carefully.

If you are past the statute of limitations, the bar is intentionally virtually impossibly high.

You would need sufficient evidence to support a claim that NVIDIA intentionally lied, which you obviously don't have otherwise you would have mentioned it in your post.

Would even an intentional lie act to to reset the limitation period here? The hypothetical lie wasn't a deep secret exposed by some whistleblower, it came to light by... reading the vesting agreement. Since AFAIK limitation periods run from "know or ought to have known," I can't see a viable construction to keep the dispute live after 30 years.

An open question is what happened to the 15,625 shares that he received when he exercised his options in 1996?

If he had held on to those, they would be worth even more than the additional 9,375 shares he was entitled to -- about $1.7 billion using the same numbers in the post.

My guess is that he probably sold them when they were worth a lot less then they are now, and would have done the same with the additional shares too.

Yeah, that's the problem with this. Should one get the present day value of the shares (a billion), or present day value of the worth at that time (thousands)?

It's a bit the same as people making fun of someone buying a pizza with bitcoin, now worth a hundred thousand. It wasn't at the time, and most likely people would've sold it long before when it started to rise. And the hindsight should then be just as much "if you bought a pizza at the time in USD, why didn't you buy bitcoin instead??".

So to me one should get the latter of the two alternatives. People only come out of the woodwork because it suddenly happened to be worth a lot.

The pizza-bitcoin story is about $1B, not a measly $100,000, FWIW. Assuming you're referring to the 10k BTC for 2 pizzas story, anyway.

The pizza Bitcoin story is not about a mere $1 billion.

The guy that sold his Bitcoin for pizza, did multiple transactions (detailed in that forum thread), not one. Somehow this part is lost to history when the story gets told.

He liquidated tens of thousands of Bitcoins.

The tally is a lot closer to ~$4 billion at $82k per coin.

Aye, quite so. I once wiped a drive with a whole bitcoin I mined myself on it.

I'm not that upset because I know for a fact I would have cashed out at the obvious peak of about $30.

The one that does cause the occasional pang of remorse is the million or so dogecoin I gave away, as by the time I realised it was worth anything at all it was worth more than my house

Thanks for sharing, Eric.

I learned a long time ago that everyone has a story of missed mega-riches in Silicon Valley. I have a few of my own :-)

So is there not a case for suing not for the shares but being told the wrong information at the time? It seems wrong to be mislead by a company who owes you shares in this way.

Then, in April 1996 - by which time I’d expatriated to the Kingdom of Tonga and was working on various internet startup schemes

Why would an American working in software in the mid 90s expatriate to Tonga, a tiny island nation, population ~100k, virtually no tech industry, with little or no internet back then? (assuming Eric is American).

Maybe a govt IT contract, but it sounds at odds to "working on various internet startup schemes".

Tax (not cheating!,) optimization?

(Retract the cheating dig if not applicable. Make it in the first place b/c I’m bummed when folks who make their money thanks to a country’s infra, laws, etc. don’t pay their fair share, at least in those cases when there’s so much you can even give back half and have immense riches.)

Don't Americans pay US tax regardless of where they live?

https://www.tonic.to

Read papers given to you!

When someone dismisses your interpretation it serves to understand it well.

Additionally: A contractual mistake would likely not return specific performance (stock) unless special conditions were met.

For example: a company makes a stock mistake, you observe that at the time it happens, but then do nothing until you see the stock increase in value. Company could assert you _were_ due the stock but the value of that stock is determined by the time-of-breach and they return you $.

Unless you had a substantial claim to voting interest would probably be monetary reward!

NYL

Read papers given to you!

I don't. I blame on the ADHD. Or maybe its laziness.

It seems to me that if OP had been granted 25k shares instead of 15k, he would have sold 25k shares instead of 15k. So even aside from the statute of limitations, the damages would be something like the value of 10k shares in 1993, perhaps plus 30 years of interest.

The value in 1996 when he could have exercised these options was probably $0 since Nvidia hadn’t gone public and was at risk of going bankrupt.

SS Vallejo, is that the old Alan Watts houseboat??

This guy has had some interesting side quests.

https://time.com/archive/6735546/hes-the-master-of-his-domai...

Love to hear how that self-sustaining island project worked out!

Here in the land of the free, it turns out a company only has to honor its contractual obligations for a little while.

If Nvidia showed you contract paperwork that proved they overpaid you 9,375 shares in 1993, would you agree to pay them back the present value? After all contracts should be enforceable indefinitely right?

Why not ask your friends to give you the equivalent stock today ?

If law was expressed as code then there wouldn't be a debate, the time limit would be explicit.

Here in the land of the free, it turns out a company only has to honor its contractual obligations for a little while.

Eceryone everywhere appears to hate statuses of limitations, but they exist for a reason, namely that after some time society needs to move on. It may be disappointing, or even cruel, for the victims, but we can't keep litigating the past forever.

Espescially so in the "land of the free" which is the land of lawyers and lawsuits.

I can only hope that my bank will someday feel the same way about my mortgage.

we can't keep litigating the past forever

It's worth pointing out this reasoning is usually considered self-evident. I've rarely seen anyone doing any kind of deepdive into a practical reason for this.

As a parent of young children it rarely makes sense to litigate anything that happened more than 10 minutes ago, so perhaps people extrapolate from there :-) I'd enjoy that deep dive, though.

I mean, there are very valid reasons behind it.

People are not expected to hold onto there documents forever, humans forget.. and change

Figuring out what happened 3 years ago is hard, figuring out what happened 30 years ago is near impossible & often wrong

This doesn't really seem like a valid reason & I suspect is misdirection.

If this were the case, litigating these instances would simply end quickly due to lack of evidence. There would be no cause for such a statute in such cases.

There are only two broad outcomes, either things stay as they are, or much of the US is returned any remaining descendents of various treaty signatories.

The first is effectively a waste of time, the second a messy descent into hell on all sides.

a messy descent into hell on all sides

Certainly messy & certainly hellish for some. For "all sides" though? I guess maybe if we're counting the fact it would paint a large target on the back of any beneficiaries.

It’s meaningless anyway because you spaffed them all away. The shares you had were enough for multi-generational wealth. The only reason you’re mad is because you want more money today to spaff. Had you been given the full amount back then, you’d still have nothing today.

And if both parties intended for it to be vesting over four years and you both acted in line with that intention, then the written contract has been superseded by your actions.

Eg You’ve worked there for 10 years, the contract you signed says you get paid 100k but you’ve both since sent letters agreeing to 150k and they’ve been paying you 150k the whole time. Would you accept them taking back 500k because of the original contract? Of course not, because you’ve both agreed to accept the new terms through your actions.

The astroturfing on this is insane.

I found the facts a bit hard to follow, but is his claim that they actually agreed to the accelerated vesting schedule, or that it was a drafting error? In the latter case, it's probably not just the statute of limitations that is blocking his claim in law or equity here.

Yea, laches in equity, right?

Then, in April 1996 - by which time I’d expatriated to the Kingdom of Tonga

It annoys me every time I read the word expat and its derivatives. You became an immigrant, by emigrating to the Kingdom of Tonga. Only because you are white and rich doesn't change the concept of emigration to warrant a word with less stigma.

Immigration is a tricky subject with many nuances, pretending otherwise i.e. driving the immigration = bad line and calling immigration that affects ourselves or that we don't find objectionable expatriation is disingenuous and hinders good quality discourse about the topic.

If he was writing to the people of the Kingdom of Tonga, it might make sense to describe himself as an immigrant. If his audience is largely American, though, the story is much more clear with "expat".

Oh man, who said the author was white? And why would this even matter for this post? I can't believe how some people manage to bring up the race issue in any possible context, regardless if it's relevant or not.

I feel like I'm going crazy reading the comments, and I guess, big props to the author for writing this in a way that pulls it off.

The issue here is, IMHO, not "Nvidia owes me stock in an ironclad way and gets away with it because of statue of limitations", but "I accepted an offer from Nvidia but the paperwork between the offer and the options grant differed in a way that both benefits me, and nobody noticed or cared about until now".

The original offer was for 25k shares, vesting over 4 years.

The options paperwork says 25k shares, vesting over 4 _quarters_.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a securities lawyer, but that seems like it could be reasonably chalked down to a clerical error on the options paperwork? "You made a mistake and now I can get a billion dollars more than we agreed to originally" doesn't feel like a great lawsuit!

Yeah, it's a little unclear but I think your interpretation is correct. The key is the paragraph beginning with:

Imagine my surprise: according to the duly signed option agreement, my options were meant to vest over four quarters, not four years, as both NVIDIA’s CFO and their outside counsel, Cooley, had asserted back in 1996.

On first reading it did give me pause because it's the first time "four years" is mentioned. But on another scan I agree it's cleverly written and never actually claims the agreement was four quarters, only that the paperwork says that.

Still it is a funny story, similar to those "I spent 20 Bitcoins on a pizza" ones, I guess.

They should just offer to settle at a reasonable value as if it had been just the four quarters previously agreed, but a smart decision was made to sit on the shares.

just the four quarters previously agreed

Misreading. S/quarters/years/

They should just offer to settle at a reasonable value

Since litigation is costly, the acceptable range for a settlement is centered around the expected outcome of a trial, plus or minus each party's cost of litigation (including opportunity cost).

In this case, "the claim is barred by the statute of limitations" implies that the expected outcome of litigation would be approximately $0. The net range for a settlement is then the 'nuisance value' of a lawsuit including any PR damage for airing the case publicly; that would be orders of magnitude below the $1bn claim.

Yes. I noted this below. A lot of times you see a decimal point in the wrong place and the courts don't just say "oh well, I guess it's a billion then!"

The rulings are fact-specific, but clearly both parties here had a mutual understanding that the paper was only meant to reflect.

You made a mistake and now I can get a billion dollars more than we agreed to originally

The world "smart contract" enthusiasts dream of.

Wouldn't a smart contract also have a statue of limitation built in?

I think the issue is even simpler. When NVIDIA ended his advisory relationship in 1996, he had 90 days to exercise his vested options. That deadline passed nearly 30 years ago, regardless of whether vesting took one year or four.

He exercised the 15,625 options NVIDIA told him had vested. His claim now is that all 25,000 had actually vested, but NVIDIA’s letter gave him the wrong number. The letter was informing him of NVIDIA’s calculation; it did not change the option agreement. So the question is whether being given that incorrect information in 1996 gives him a claim today, despite both the exercise deadline and the statute of limitations having passed.

Then, in April 1996 - by which time I’d expatriated to the Kingdom of Tonga...

This is why I still love California so much. The chance of things like this is just much higher than in any other place on Earth.

For me the fair outcome would be Nvidia paying the 1996 share-price + inflation; not the 2026 share-price. They could neither force him to hold them for 30 years; not prevent him from having bought as many as he wanted. The only error was they slightly underpaid him.

I can also see why these claims age out; else all old companies would have enough uncertainty they would be uninvestable.

These are always fun little what ifs. In 2012 I sold $50k in Amazon stock to pay off my student loans - a hilariously bad financial decision in retrospect, since the loans had capped interest rates, and that $50k of 2012 amazon stock would be worth over a million today...

"If only I'd put all my money on red before they span the roulette wheel!"

The angle I haven't heard, yet I think would make the most sense, is that you both understood the agreement correctly, at the time.

Somebody did the paperwork wrong, but paperwork isn't the agreement. You agreed what you agreed, thought everything was in order, and then discovered an error in the documents.

It doesn't seem like there's a claim here.