Early Days
It is not widely known, but I was invited to join the Technical Advisory Board of NVIDIA in 1993 by Jensen (at that time, sans leather jacket)1. In September 1993, I was granted 25,000 options, “in a series of quarterly installments so that all shares shall vest upon the expiration of one year from Grant Date.”2
This invitation followed a meeting I had with Jensen, Curtis Priem, and Chris Malachowsky on my houseboat, the SS Vallejo, in Sausalito. I’d done a fair bit of work with Curtis circa 1990, when he was at Sun Microsystems, architect of the SPARCstation GX chip. Sun was one of the companies supporting my early virtual reality company, Sense8 Corporation. The Sun GX was blazingly fast at blitting polygons - some 50k/second - and we’d ported Sense8’s VR rendering to it. Subsequently, I implemented bilinear texture mapping using the Intel i750 DVI chip.
But what caught Curtis’s attention in 1993, and caused him to bring the other NVIDIA founders to visit me for a demo, was my fast implementation of biquadratic texture mapping. Details are in US5796426A and subsequent patents.
Curtis understood the potential of non-linear texture mapping to differentiate NVIDIA’s first product, the NV1, from the competition.
I worked for while, quite casually, with Curtis on porting my biquadratic texture mapping to their hardware, and wrote the code for an Intel-sponsored VR string-quartet demo on prototype NVIDIA hardware - actually a GX card in a PCI adapter - shown at the Guggenheim SoHo in 1993.
When the NV1 finally shipped in 1995, Microsoft decided, for reasons of their own, not to support quadratic texture mapping, or even quads, in their just-released DirectX toolkit - triangles only. This had a devastating effect on NVIDIA’s finances and prospects, and the company laid off a large percentage of its staff.
Then, in April 1996 - by which time I’d expatriated to the Kingdom of Tonga and was working on various internet startup schemes - 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.3 I did, and then forgot all about it.
30 Years Later
Fast-forward to 2024. I’m sitting with a day-trader friend, surrounded by screens all blaring news about NVIDIA, the Most Important Company on Earth. So I went home and dug through my folder of old documents.
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. The math is clear: 15,625 of 25,000 shares is 62.5%, exactly what you’d expect after ten quarters of a four-year vesting schedule. On the one-year schedule the agreement actually specified, all 25,000 shares should have vested well before that letter was even written.
With the stock’s many splits - a cumulative 480x to date - my missing 9,375 shares are now 4,500,000 shares. A handsome enough pile that I engaged formidable attorneys Allan Steyer of Steyer Lowenthal, and Chris Burke of Korein Tillery, to explore the issue. Consummate advocates, letterheads with substantial gravitas.
After about a year of my attorneys and NVIDIA’s in-house and outside counsel sending letters back and forth citing case law and blustering, I mentioned to my attorneys that, as I was growing elderly and there seemed to be no end to this exchange of letters, perhaps they could meet and settle. NVIDIA did not dispute the authenticity of the option agreement, only that my claims were long since time-barred.
The meeting was held with great professionalism, but Cooley’s answer was, in essence, “so sue us.” 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.
Lessons?
I offer this in the spirit of a cautionary tale. I’m sure there are lessons here for those with a more phlegmatic personality than mine. Here in the land of the free, it turns out a company only has to honor its contractual obligations for a little while.
Has anyone else discovered a similar vesting surprise, decades later? And how was it resolved?
I remain sanguine, and amused. As the Emperor Septimius Severus quipped: “Omnia fui, nihil expedit.”
Eric Gullichsen, September 2026
