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.
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.
Beyond tech demos, yes, lots of customers of the WorldToolKit product. From NASA to artist Jenny Holzer. Sense8 was acquired in 1998 by Engineering Animation.
It sounds like he probably forgot about them until his trader friends brought up nvidia. Otherwise why would he go digging through his documents upon being reminded?
I hope to have such a retirement, although my interest is primarily in video games.
I dream of making high quality games that you buy once, and after a bit I’d open source everything. I’d also love to hire a small team, I’d probably move to a cheaper country though.
Unfortunately the game industry is a horrible business if you need to make an income though.
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
Yep. I was on a fixed term contract, which had expired, even though I was still working on the project well after its expiration. It would have been interesting to argue that any IP assignment expired with the contract. As you said: messy. As I judged: not worth it.
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.
Indeed. The boat was - and as far as I know still remains - one of those very special magical places on the planet. Built in 1879, and still sturdy and loved, evidence perhaps of Taleb's principle of antifragility. Some tales are in my as-yet unpublished autobiography. Kinda chilly in the winter though.
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...
Yep, that was it. Our department (Humanware) was quite forward-thinking, and an anomaly in an otherwise conservative institution. Unfortunately we never ended up using VR in any of our products! They also brought in Edward Tufte, whose show-and-tell included his personal copy of what was likely Sir Henry Billingsley's 1570 English translation of Euclid's Elements.
Quads and biquadratic texture mapping truly were an awful choice and it's incredible that the company still pulled through. I have an NV1 floating around somewhere; I should dust it off again.
I'm familiar enough with the history, but I really have to wonder why quads were pursued. It seems like even at the time, triangles were the obvious long-term bet. Of course it's never quite that obvious at the time, but nevertheless quads seem like one of those weird tech offshoots that are simply too different to ever get traction, like ternary arithmetic. And the trajectory of transistor counts was such that per-pixel division for perfect perspective correctness was simply inevitable.
Why did Nvidia think quads were a good idea over triangles when SGI was doing triangles? What is a holdover of Sun thinking? Was it a patent differentiation play? I discounted Nvidia early on because of this.
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.
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.
No. Owner did not exercise all of the options he was entitled to because he relied on a miscalculated value in a letter reminding him he could exercise them. So he should have paid them and he’s arguing it’s their fault he didn’t remember the other options.
Correction: the author accepted a grant for X options, that they must exercise to own. The author exercised a percentage of the options. They did not exercise all of their options. They left the company without exercising the remaining options. This is equivalent to forfeiting the options.
Now, 25 years later the author is preparing a litigation.
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.
Sure, but it seems like people are struggling to follow the basic facts:
1) The author received communication 30 years ago that he had 15,625 stock options available to exercise;
2) However, according to some paperwork he had, he believes now that he actually had 25,000 stock options vested
The problem is, if we accept this as true (and it sounds like the paperwork had conflicting info about the vesting, and that the part that suggested the 25,000 vested might have been an error, so this part is not at all clear), all it means is that the author owned some additional stock options 30 years ago which he failed to exercise. These options have long since expired and so would be worthless today.
The author is claiming that the communication he received was misrepresentation, but if so the statue of limitations has long since expired.
I think a lot of the commenters are conflating stock options with actual shares themselves (which surprises me given the nature of this place, but regardless). If we were talking about 15,625 vs 25,000 shares then it's a different story since shares don't expire and don't need to be exercised. He would still have a claim to the extra shares--the claim would be that he had owned them this whole time. But options are a different story because of expiration.
> I think a lot of the commenters are conflating stock options with actual shares themselves
I think the author caused that misunderstanding by talking about the value of the shares and not the payment he could have made to exercise his options.
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”.
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.
That’s not how the real world works. Sometimes the chance of winning is actually 0, and sometimes when you pursue something frivolously you actually end up having to pay the other side’s fees. The EV of a lawsuit can easily be less than 0.
> 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.
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 we 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...
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.
It's not just about storage. It's about fairness and creating an environment where people can transact in a relatively stable and predictable manner.
It is inherently unfair and destabilizing if people can sit on alleged wrongs, violations of agreements, etc. indefinitely, either intentionally or because they were ignorant or negligent, and then raise those wrongs in the court system any time they choose to.
A statue of limitations basically says "take your rights and obligations seriously and when you have a dispute over them with another party, raise it in a reasonable amount of time or forever hold your peace".
It's not just a burden for the immediate parties. Having the ability to dispute rights and obligation going back indeterminate amounts of time adds risk to the rights and obligations of untold numbers of third-parties; everybody's interests become more interdependent and intertwined the more time has elapsed. One of the important functions of a legal system is to settle rights and obligations. Settled, transparent rights and obligations are also integral to notions of fairness and justice, so it's not a zero sum thing that statutes of limitations sacrifice fairness for cold transactional efficiency.
At least in Germany, you can restart the expiration by trying to enforce the claim. So you can’t just wait and avoid getting caught, the other side basically has to forget about you.
- If you wait too long to pursue a case, then the reliability of evidence goes down, as people lose older records, memories fail, physical infrastructure is replaced, etc.
- Statutes of limitations diminish the ability of malicious accusers to pursue cases against their targets.
- Statutes of limitations also create a sense of finality to a situation; it prevents people from coming out of the woodwork to unsettle something settled 20 years ago.
- In general, the clock runs from when you first find out about an injury to when you can first take action do something about it. That action isn't necessarily to actually file a lawsuit; there are often many things you can do to pause or reset the clock before filing the lawsuit.
- They also incentivize people to pursue redress sooner rather than later, with the concomitant benefits of doing so.
- If it takes you, say, five years to figure out that you are really mad about being injured by somebody... why were you fine with it for five years? It really undercuts your argument about the seriousness of the injury to delay for so long.
Even if they won, Nvidia would only be obligated to deliver a fresh option contract. E.g. they would issue options today with the same strike price difference. The options mentioned in the block post are not worth more than $6000 and even that is generous. Selling those options on the open market probably would have generated $1500 in income.
Let's say those options were worth $0.25 back then, Nvidia would have to issue an option with a strike price of $224.72 at a share price of $225.07 and the same duration to honor the contract. They could also set the issue date and duration to be the IPO day and the strike price the IPO share price, but then the premium difference would have to compensate the gap between the IPO price and the current price and you'd have to pay that premium difference out of pocket to simulate the fact that you kept holding an option, then let it expire and kept paying the premium to buy new options to extend it.
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.
Uh the vast majority of people exercise and hold to start the clock on LTCG. Very rare and frankly mostly financially unsophisticated people who immediately sell just to cash out.
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.
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
I'm just differentiating between the legal correctness and personal opinion/viewpoints on the matter.
Regardless of whether you are legally correct or not isn't really the crux of the issue for me, heck maybe Jensen doesn't even care about a billion given everything's he's minting (who knows though).
I was only talking from personal standing, in your stated cases or if I was in this position (I made some assumptions regarding the case), it would be a breaches of good faith and I would find it hard to trust them in a partnership ever again.
Only my POV, maybe the folks at the B level don't care about this as much since they are starting to fling Ts around. I can see how some people wouldn't really care, i.e. treating them as a freelancer and main objective is getting something done, but on a personal basis probably wouldn't trust them (say on personal matters that are company defining).
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.
Well in reality it’s not that big of a mistake because he probably would have sold these shares when he sold the first 62.5%……which I assume was not recently
Yes, rich people whining about not having enough money is nauseating, as is the people on this site rushing to his defense. I assume you all consider yourselves middle class...
At most we can read between the lines and infer that if he forgot about these shares and documents since 1996, he also didn't sell any of them in all that time and thus he still owns the ones he actually bought. But we don't know that for sure.
We certainly don't know that he was rich in 1996 (he was living on a houseboat in Sausalito then moved to Tonga, so, probably not?) nor that he has become wealthy outside of any Nvidia stock he still owns.
All the evidence I can see is that he's the kind of person HN should admire: someone who has mostly just been interested in developing great technology for its own sake and not for personal enrichment. And now, because he didn't really care about money in 1996, a tranche of stock that's now valued at a billion dollars remains with Nvidia rather than being available to him to use – which he may have put to worthy use like public benefit investing or charitable giving.
But whatever the case, it's never ok to act like an asshole about people on HN.
We don't know enough to justify the jeering. We don't know he was rich in 1996. We don't know he's rich now. We can read between the lines and infer that he possibly still retains Nvidia stock that is worth a lot, but we don't know that for sure. We only know that a tranche of stock that he was entitled to remains with Nvidia and is worth a lot of money now. Maybe he would have done really admirable, benevolent things with that money. Who knows? It doesn't matter. It's never ok to jeer or sneer on HN.
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.
Look, without going into all the details... the contract the insurance company had pressured me to sign quickly so the contractor could start ("We don't want to lose them! It's so hard to find a contractor during the pandemic!") had a clause in it that said the contractor wasn't responsible for damages to my property caused by their crews.
So the 40-foot tree they killed by dumping all their paint thinner on the roots, or the paint splatter they got all over my fireplace using it as a mixing station, or the foundation that they cracked by breaking three tension cables while doing exploratory surgery trying to install a better drain in the laundry room (so the flood wouldn't happen again), or the electrical circuits they cut and put drywall over to hide the old plugs, or all the tools my grandfather left me that they stole... or the... look, the non-cosmetic issues in my counterclaim filled over 80 pages of a lawsuit, without photos. It was extensive, documented damage they did to my house.
Anyway, the contract also called for mandatory binding arbitration. So we went in, and the mediator was like, "OK, tossing all your claims. Great, now that those are tossed, pay them for their work."
The mediator said, "Look, we have to give the benefit of the doubt to these hard-working men who came to your aid in your hour of need. Was the job done right? Maybe not, but they were the ones you chose to hire. You can choose anyone, and you picked them and signed their contract."
Oof.
I had a video of them dumping paint thinner at the base of my tree, they did it 5x in one day. I had videos of all of it. I had soil samples showing the tree died from paint thinner being dumped on it. The mediator was like, "It's not relevant because of your contract, but I'll humor you... Yes, you have videos but we can't tell what they are dumping. Yes, you have a soil sample, but how do we know you didn't just do this to your own tree?" It was just so surreal.
It was a large company, more like a loose network of contractors that sub-sub-subcontract everything. The lack of accountability was a huge problem since there had been over 160 people in my home, plumbers, carpenters, tile guys, etc. over the span of the construction, and even though I had cameras it was on me to prove the people worked for the parent company I was in a lawsuit with and not just random people I had let into my house... "How do we know these problems were caused by XYZ company's staff or contractors?" And I'd have to be like, "You think I hired my own painters? I wasn't trying to a parallel remodel project... everyone was their guys..." But it was on me to prove and I didn't have IDs or full names fro 95% of them.
Anyway, I also found out afterward that the mediator was a retired judge who had done literally nothing but cases for them for the last two-plus years before my case. The contract called for them to be able to pick two or three mediators, and we could then pick one from their list... but the fact that one mediator was able to stay employed doing nothing but cases for this one giant insurance/contractor organization... well, I couldn't help but feel like they knew where their bread was buttered. =P
Anyway, I had to pay all my cost of living for 2+ years while not living in my house. I had to pay for my lawyer and all the experts I had hired to build my case. Since I lost the mediation, I had to pay for their lawyer. I had to pay them for the shoddy work they did, as well as a very high late penalty. This is where it gets super shady too, in that my insurance company mandated I use someone from that network, and the contract said I had to pay my deductible, and 50% up front and 50% on completion. Fair.
But it came out in mediation that the insurance company paid this contractor 100% up front. So that took all their motivation away from fixing my house and let them drag it out almost three ye...
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 vested options before they expired. So, this issued 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.
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 the human? These don't really seem like opening-the-flood-gates types of decisions that 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.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We don't need you to love capitalism (or billionaires), we just need you to stop posting low-effort flamebait comments like this one (or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49840585). You may not owe capitalism or billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
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.
A few do, I’ve been really lucky to work with a startup that got acquired earlier this year and took really great care of the whole team. After reading so many horror stories of acquisitions that was a relief to see the whole leadership and team work together to ensure people are taken care of.
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.
Thanks for taking your time to write the comment, I appreciate it and for the life lesson to actually read the contracts, carefully. I imagine that it doesn't become a priority or we are too busy for it until we suddenly aren't (seems like its a lot closer to hygiene/health)
Perhaps we can call it as a form of legal hygiene so as to impart the habit to the next generation. (Please feel free to correct me or tell me if there's a more proper term to what I am referring as, as well but I like the intuition/metaphor of treating it as hygiene.)
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?
I find it weird, not polite, personally. Polite would be to not bother them and just use it anyway without drawing their attention to yourself unnecessarily.
Why would you assume they would be bothered? They are actively discussing with us all on an open forum. And can just ignore if they don’t want to engage
I didn't assume they would be bothered. I view asking them as performatively seeking attention and therefore bothersome. It's a norm about the general situation not a prediction about the individual one.
> At best: you actually win money. At worst: you don't
No, at worst the court orders you to pay for the time spent by lawyers working for the company you sued. This option exists to nudge that calculation “it’s a million to one chance, but it might just work” away from filing lawsuits just for the hell of it.
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.
So someone who was previously unknown brought all this attention on themselves while being a coy billionaire? We live in strange times so it's possible but doubtful.
Yep. He is trying to stir up public opinion after his legal options petered out.
Admitting the status of his original shares is not a good look either way. Either he sold, and the additional shares aren't technically worth $1B because he'd have sold them too. Otherwise he held, and is another unsatisfied greedy billionaire in the world.
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.
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.
A good framework would have been this: for the options you received, let's see what you did. Did you trade them 3 years later, resulting in $X amount? Then, let's assume you would have done the same with the missing stock options. I would guess that the amount would be really negligible - in the tens or hundreds of thousands, at most. Ethically, I think this is where I would consider it fair to both parties.
Then, you neglected this for ~30 years. It's fair to say that Nvidia doesn't owe you anything at this point.
Wouldn't be surprised if you weren't the only person with equity in nvidia around that time with similar paperwork errors, were that to be the case if word got around they settled with you, more people would start coming forward for the easy money.
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?
Yes, you are entitled. This has been a big point of contention in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. A lot of the property was nationalized, their former owners defected, and then the heirs came back decades later requesting their property back. In some cases where there was a house, there was now a 15-story building.
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 and signed treaties should be honoured.
You may say "But, they were here first!", yet that's quite false. Native Americans invaded themselves, 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.
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.
Your argument in the post up-thread appears to be that because the Native Americans did not cultivate or make use of the land in any Western sense, they have no claim to ownership. The Kant quote attempts to repudiate this by stating that it makes no difference whether we consider the Native Americans' use of the land to be ineffective: their deprivation of it is still an injustice and, when it comes to injustice, the ends cannot justify the means.
I don't find Kant's position at all convincing, mostly because (as your later post shows) the two parties' understandings of "ownership" are not mutually intelligible. However, the quote does have relevance to your post.
The key here is 'use'. Kant, while obviously not some gospel to be held to any form of authority, is making a point about differences in culture and sure, as you said, use. However, my point wasn't disputing usage at all. Living on it. Hunting on it. Working the land.
However no view exists in a vacuum, and I will indelibly view my example of a group of 4 as a valid statement, about the absurdities of 'walked on the land once in my life, to get to my summer/winter home', compared to some claims of a tribe of a few hundred people, somehow owning hundreds of millions of acres of land, just cause they walked on tiny parts of it to get to their seasonal homes.
So no, I don't see the relevance, because I'm not discussing the concepts therein directly.
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.
The simple reason is that if we allow litigating over ownership based on 30-year-old facts, nothing is ever settled. Maybe your house, with its 30 year mortgage paid off, actually belongs to someone else. Maybe that kid you shoved in 3rd grade comes back 40 years later and asserts their lifelong earnings were reduced by $100m because of the trauma.
The statute of limitations regime exists to provide stability. If you are harmed, you have some amount of time to make a claim.
Doing away with the statute of limitations would result in more injustice, not less.
"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?"
Give the guy a break. It was a check of 700 bucks for exercising shares in a small (at the time) company that was not even public. Most people would probably not notice the error in the 1 year vs 4 year exercise schedule. Especially because 4 years is the standard, so that seems rather normal to agree to that even though it was an error and differing from the original offer.
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.
> In this case a 1% chance of $1bn represents an expected value of $10m.
This case has a 0% chance of anything because of the statute of limitations and no legitimate claim that would allow for decades-long tolling. He'd file suit, NVIDIA would file a motion to dismiss, the court would probably give him one chance to amend (to make an argument about tolling) and then it would be dismissed with prejudice.
If the full agreement had a prevailing-party attorney fee clause, this guy could end up paying NVIDIA's legal fees.
The straightforward expected value calculation doesn't account for nonlinear utility in a one-off event. Gaining a billion dollars is not a thousand times better than losing a million dollars.
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.
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 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 I can recall from my memory, my suggestion was also prompted by the marketing hype machine surrounding the retail boxed release of Windows 95 as a hot new thing. And by that point in time it had become quite "common" for middle class households to have a desktop PC which had a CD-ROM drive, sound card, decent "multimedia" capabilities. And people were legitimately eager to upgrade to Windows 95.
It was sufficiently mass market and popular that it was everywhere in Pacific Northwest (Portland to the Canadian border region) television and print media. It was enough of a cultural phenomenon that I remember seeing media coverage of people who lined up outside the retail boxed software store at midnight to purchase it.
Oh how times have changed :) i actively avoided upgrading to Win 11 before I decided to jump to Linux for home, and im still not on Tahoe for my work computer
Hindsight as they say is 2020 and in early 2020 I bought Nvidia shares as I figured a lot people wouldn't have much to do except play games, sold them in 2022 as I thought there won't be many people upgrading their rigs as things got back to normal and there won't be much demand for graphics cards, made money, could have made more, oh well!
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.
I still listen to 14 year old me when it comes to investments, like when in 2016 they whispered “GPUs are going to be hot shit because of this CUDA stuff. And games.” in my middle aged brain.
Gonna listen to my kid when she’s 14, too, as it’s been a strategy that has paid off to date.
I remember looking at AMD stock when it was $3.50 to put some money in. Never did because there was a real chance they weren’t going to make it but here we are, shouldn’t have looked at what they’re at now, rough.
I beat you to it by eight years. I was 16 in 1987 when I asked my father to lend me $5K to invest in Microsoft. It was at ~$0.30/share. That would have been around $8.5M today. He said no. To be fair though, he likely said no simply because he didn't have it to lend me.
A friend sold his house in 2005. He was a huge Apple fanboy. With the proceeds that were left after he paid off his mortgage, he splurged on a quadcore Power Mac G5, and a new top of the range PowerBook.
And then put the rest into Apple stock. I told him he was absolutely insane.
He sold about a quarter of it at some point in 2018, but is currently sitting on several million dollars of gain.
Last year, I got an email from a college friend who reminded me that I'd told him to buy MSFT shares in 1986. Neither he nor I did, so I file this in my 'Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda' file, alongside similar stories about Cisco in 1991, Netflix in 2001, and Bitcoin in 2011.
I remember looking into Bitcoin in 2012, and thinking:
"This will never work as a currency, because of the max number of bitcoins it will inherently be deflationary, and the value will go up, which means that there will be a disincentive to spend it, because the value will just go up..."
I could have used BTC to buy into the ethereum ICO and I made up every excuse under the sun that a young kid who wrote shit python code could never compete with the gold rock.
Since then I've heavily revised my thinking. Primarily that I don't dismiss things as easily anymore. I try to focus on coming up with a reason to like it instead of disliking it.
> 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.
Yes, his possession of all the agreements for 30+ is what makes this so difficult.
But here's a hypothetical situation (unrealistic) that could change things. Let's say he came into possession of an internal document showing that someone at NVIDIA knew the grant said one year and chose to state 4 years to him anyway. Now he has an argument for fraud, and in California, the statute of limitations for fraud is 3 years from the date when you discover the fraud.
This type of thing could get him past a motion to dismiss provided that he brings the action within the 3 years after discovering the evidence of fraud. But nothing in the post claims this type of evidence. It just seems like a mistake was made and the guy, not knowing what NVIDIA would become, didn't even bother to check the documents he had at the time.
As I understand it they thought there was a chance Nvidia would settle, since the lawyers worked on contingency instead of telling him not to waste his time
By this guy's account, his attorneys sent and responded to a number of letters and arranged for a meeting with NVIDIA counsel. So you have to put it in context: this didn't demand a whole lot of time and effort, and they never actually filed a lawsuit.
From the looks of it, this firm primarily works on contingency, so it's not like they were doing anything out of the ordinary. They took a flyer on his "case" on the off chance that some correspondence might lead NVIDIA to throw a few bucks at this guy.
I empathise. I won’t go into detail here, but 20 years ago I built something that went on to be a major commercial success - after I had been coerced into signing over ownership at the pointy end of a lawyer. For not dissimilar reasons, it’s a lost cause at this point.
For what it’s worth, I just view it as part of the lottery of life. You win some, you lose some, you learn plenty.
Your lawyers told you they were representing you, not because they thought your claim could prevail, but because you might be able to get into discovery, at which point the cost to NVIDIA in time and hassle would force them to settle?
I hope NVIDIA's lawyers are reading this comment and filing a state bar complaint against your attorneys.
Why? Thinking you won't prevail doesn't mean you can't try.
It would be different if they thought their claim had no merit, or were hiding evidence that it was a fraudulent claim. But here, it seems like it's just a slightly long-shot due to the timing. AFAICT there's no problem in pursuing claims like that, either for the client or the attorney.
Thinking you can only survive a motion to dismiss, where your allegations have to be accepted as true, but that you can’t win the case if you have to go to trial, is thinking that your case has no merit. It’s misconduct.
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 9,375 shares he was entitled to but didn't exercise -- about $1.7 billion according to his math.
My guess is that he probably sold them when they were worth a lot less then they are today, and would have done the same with the remaining shares as well.
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.
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
I did the same but with 16 and maybe somewhere around 30 coins in two wallets I thought I backed up. I was angry but at the time I maybe lost $3-6 (probably way less) so I moved on with my life.
> People only come out of the woodwork because it suddenly happened to be worth a lot.
I used to work in pharma with a chemist whose medicinal chem team had invented 3 different multi-billion-$ prescription drugs.
He told me ... no one gives a shit about your patents unless you start to make money. when that happens, your competitors suddenly remember that they invented your drug before you did.
He spent a considerable amount of time being deposed by lawyers from rival big-pharma companies.
Yeah, I tell myself this every time I remember clicking "Cancel" on Ameritrade and deciding not to buy Apple stock in 1995. I probably would've sold when it doubled, thinking myself very clever. I wouldn't still have it today.
I'll just say that I'm aware of instances where founders have used "clerical errors" in an attempt to trick departed employees from properly vesting their options.
I don't have any inside info about this case obviously, but it's clear Nvidia would have ample motive to try to claw back whatever they could as mid 1996 was when they made their pivot after the disaster.
Again, not throwing around accusations here, just saying it may not be as cut and dried as "it was just an oops but everyone forgot about it for 30 years."
Bought $1000 of MSFT right after IPO. Went up 20% very quickly. Sold it immediately feeling confident I'd done the right thing. Worth $5+ million now I think?
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".
Still massively sucks though. Not quite as bad as the guy who bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin but still a situation that would be impossible to ever get over.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 51.7 ms ] threadDid anything progress past tech demos?
I’m in a small game dev group and I very much enjoy seeing how older engineers tackle problems.
I hope to have such a retirement, although my interest is primarily in video games.
I dream of making high quality games that you buy once, and after a bit I’d open source everything. I’d also love to hire a small team, I’d probably move to a cheaper country though.
Unfortunately the game industry is a horrible business if you need to make an income though.
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.
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
Yep. I was on a fixed term contract, which had expired, even though I was still working on the project well after its expiration. It would have been interesting to argue that any IP assignment expired with the contract. As you said: messy. As I judged: not worth it.
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.
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.
I'm familiar enough with the history, but I really have to wonder why quads were pursued. It seems like even at the time, triangles were the obvious long-term bet. Of course it's never quite that obvious at the time, but nevertheless quads seem like one of those weird tech offshoots that are simply too different to ever get traction, like ternary arithmetic. And the trajectory of transistor counts was such that per-pixel division for perfect perspective correctness was simply inevitable.
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.
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.
Now, 25 years later the author is preparing a litigation.
It's a fun story, but that's all.
1) The author received communication 30 years ago that he had 15,625 stock options available to exercise;
2) However, according to some paperwork he had, he believes now that he actually had 25,000 stock options vested
The problem is, if we accept this as true (and it sounds like the paperwork had conflicting info about the vesting, and that the part that suggested the 25,000 vested might have been an error, so this part is not at all clear), all it means is that the author owned some additional stock options 30 years ago which he failed to exercise. These options have long since expired and so would be worthless today.
The author is claiming that the communication he received was misrepresentation, but if so the statue of limitations has long since expired.
I think a lot of the commenters are conflating stock options with actual shares themselves (which surprises me given the nature of this place, but regardless). If we were talking about 15,625 vs 25,000 shares then it's a different story since shares don't expire and don't need to be exercised. He would still have a claim to the extra shares--the claim would be that he had owned them this whole time. But options are a different story because of expiration.
I think the author caused that misunderstanding by talking about the value of the shares and not the payment he could have made to exercise his options.
Firms can be sanctioned for pursuing cases knowing the statute of limitations has expired.
That was my first thought as well.
Source: cannabis and Law&Order reruns.
What OP has here is a license to go on a fishing expedition through NVIDIA.
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 we 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...
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 is inherently unfair and destabilizing if people can sit on alleged wrongs, violations of agreements, etc. indefinitely, either intentionally or because they were ignorant or negligent, and then raise those wrongs in the court system any time they choose to.
A statue of limitations basically says "take your rights and obligations seriously and when you have a dispute over them with another party, raise it in a reasonable amount of time or forever hold your peace".
- If you wait too long to pursue a case, then the reliability of evidence goes down, as people lose older records, memories fail, physical infrastructure is replaced, etc.
- Statutes of limitations diminish the ability of malicious accusers to pursue cases against their targets.
- Statutes of limitations also create a sense of finality to a situation; it prevents people from coming out of the woodwork to unsettle something settled 20 years ago.
- In general, the clock runs from when you first find out about an injury to when you can first take action do something about it. That action isn't necessarily to actually file a lawsuit; there are often many things you can do to pause or reset the clock before filing the lawsuit.
- They also incentivize people to pursue redress sooner rather than later, with the concomitant benefits of doing so.
- If it takes you, say, five years to figure out that you are really mad about being injured by somebody... why were you fine with it for five years? It really undercuts your argument about the seriousness of the injury to delay for so long.
Let's say those options were worth $0.25 back then, Nvidia would have to issue an option with a strike price of $224.72 at a share price of $225.07 and the same duration to honor the contract. They could also set the issue date and duration to be the IPO day and the strike price the IPO share price, but then the premium difference would have to compensate the gap between the IPO price and the current price and you'd have to pay that premium difference out of pocket to simulate the fact that you kept holding an option, then let it expire and kept paying the premium to buy new options to extend 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.
A bit of cash can turn folks into awful people, and some contracts are just a obfuscated legal con of the naive. =3
I'm just differentiating between the legal correctness and personal opinion/viewpoints on the matter.
Regardless of whether you are legally correct or not isn't really the crux of the issue for me, heck maybe Jensen doesn't even care about a billion given everything's he's minting (who knows though).
I was only talking from personal standing, in your stated cases or if I was in this position (I made some assumptions regarding the case), it would be a breaches of good faith and I would find it hard to trust them in a partnership ever again.
Only my POV, maybe the folks at the B level don't care about this as much since they are starting to fling Ts around. I can see how some people wouldn't really care, i.e. treating them as a freelancer and main objective is getting something done, but on a personal basis probably wouldn't trust them (say on personal matters that are company defining).
Well quoted.
You’re not the only one who want to see this go somewhere.
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.
2. He didn’t “forget” — he misunderstood his contract, and only caught the error much later.
3. He’s not looking for pity. He writes: “I offer this in the spirit of a cautionary tale. I remain sanguine, and amused.”
Maybe something about his story bothered you?
it isnt false and you would know that if you read the article. Please dont comment on HN without reading the article....
We certainly don't know that he was rich in 1996 (he was living on a houseboat in Sausalito then moved to Tonga, so, probably not?) nor that he has become wealthy outside of any Nvidia stock he still owns.
All the evidence I can see is that he's the kind of person HN should admire: someone who has mostly just been interested in developing great technology for its own sake and not for personal enrichment. And now, because he didn't really care about money in 1996, a tranche of stock that's now valued at a billion dollars remains with Nvidia rather than being available to him to use – which he may have put to worthy use like public benefit investing or charitable giving.
But whatever the case, it's never ok to act like an asshole about people on HN.
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.
Look, without going into all the details... the contract the insurance company had pressured me to sign quickly so the contractor could start ("We don't want to lose them! It's so hard to find a contractor during the pandemic!") had a clause in it that said the contractor wasn't responsible for damages to my property caused by their crews.
So the 40-foot tree they killed by dumping all their paint thinner on the roots, or the paint splatter they got all over my fireplace using it as a mixing station, or the foundation that they cracked by breaking three tension cables while doing exploratory surgery trying to install a better drain in the laundry room (so the flood wouldn't happen again), or the electrical circuits they cut and put drywall over to hide the old plugs, or all the tools my grandfather left me that they stole... or the... look, the non-cosmetic issues in my counterclaim filled over 80 pages of a lawsuit, without photos. It was extensive, documented damage they did to my house.
Anyway, the contract also called for mandatory binding arbitration. So we went in, and the mediator was like, "OK, tossing all your claims. Great, now that those are tossed, pay them for their work."
The mediator said, "Look, we have to give the benefit of the doubt to these hard-working men who came to your aid in your hour of need. Was the job done right? Maybe not, but they were the ones you chose to hire. You can choose anyone, and you picked them and signed their contract."
Oof.
I had a video of them dumping paint thinner at the base of my tree, they did it 5x in one day. I had videos of all of it. I had soil samples showing the tree died from paint thinner being dumped on it. The mediator was like, "It's not relevant because of your contract, but I'll humor you... Yes, you have videos but we can't tell what they are dumping. Yes, you have a soil sample, but how do we know you didn't just do this to your own tree?" It was just so surreal.
It was a large company, more like a loose network of contractors that sub-sub-subcontract everything. The lack of accountability was a huge problem since there had been over 160 people in my home, plumbers, carpenters, tile guys, etc. over the span of the construction, and even though I had cameras it was on me to prove the people worked for the parent company I was in a lawsuit with and not just random people I had let into my house... "How do we know these problems were caused by XYZ company's staff or contractors?" And I'd have to be like, "You think I hired my own painters? I wasn't trying to a parallel remodel project... everyone was their guys..." But it was on me to prove and I didn't have IDs or full names fro 95% of them.
Anyway, I also found out afterward that the mediator was a retired judge who had done literally nothing but cases for them for the last two-plus years before my case. The contract called for them to be able to pick two or three mediators, and we could then pick one from their list... but the fact that one mediator was able to stay employed doing nothing but cases for this one giant insurance/contractor organization... well, I couldn't help but feel like they knew where their bread was buttered. =P
Anyway, I had to pay all my cost of living for 2+ years while not living in my house. I had to pay for my lawyer and all the experts I had hired to build my case. Since I lost the mediation, I had to pay for their lawyer. I had to pay them for the shoddy work they did, as well as a very high late penalty. This is where it gets super shady too, in that my insurance company mandated I use someone from that network, and the contract said I had to pay my deductible, and 50% up front and 50% on completion. Fair.
But it came out in mediation that the insurance company paid this contractor 100% up front. So that took all their motivation away from fixing my house and let them drag it out almost three ye...
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 last time someone decided that an option shouldn't expire got us inflation, unemployment, inequality and a debt crisis.
Good thing that we stopped right???
Looks at the funding rate of his options in his wallet that uses to buy things at the supermarket. Still no funding rate in sight.
Taking care of the human is not good for cApiTaLisM
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
We don't need you to love capitalism (or billionaires), we just need you to stop posting low-effort flamebait comments like this one (or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49840585). You may not owe capitalism or billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Unless of course the op sold the 15k shares he did get years ago.
I wish that was the usual situation
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!
Perhaps we can call it as a form of legal hygiene so as to impart the habit to the next generation. (Please feel free to correct me or tell me if there's a more proper term to what I am referring as, as well but I like the intuition/metaphor of treating it as hygiene.)
Thank you and have a nice day :-D
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?
Different norms, perhaps.
They're clearly ok with the topic being discussed and shared.
Thank you for that simple wisdom for today.
No, at worst the court orders you to pay for the time spent by lawyers working for the company you sued. This option exists to nudge that calculation “it’s a million to one chance, but it might just work” away from filing lawsuits just for the hell of it.
Ok? So the author should have those shares to his name?
It's OK, dude. We've all been there. You're in good company with Masayoshi Son on this one.
Which of the possibilities is more likely is anyone’s guess.
Admitting the status of his original shares is not a good look either way. Either he sold, and the additional shares aren't technically worth $1B because he'd have sold them too. Otherwise he held, and is another unsatisfied greedy billionaire in the world.
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.
Then, you neglected this for ~30 years. It's fair to say that Nvidia doesn't owe you anything at this point.
But why? The OP (apparently) owns some of Nvidia. It seems reasonable to get that ownership recognised.
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?
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi
In the country i am, yes. If you have the paperwork.
Seasonal camping sites make sense, more from a 'our land' perspective.
And naturally and signed treaties should be honoured.
You may say "But, they were here first!", yet that's quite false. Native Americans invaded themselves, 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.
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.
I don't find Kant's position at all convincing, mostly because (as your later post shows) the two parties' understandings of "ownership" are not mutually intelligible. However, the quote does have relevance to your post.
However no view exists in a vacuum, and I will indelibly view my example of a group of 4 as a valid statement, about the absurdities of 'walked on the land once in my life, to get to my summer/winter home', compared to some claims of a tribe of a few hundred people, somehow owning hundreds of millions of acres of land, just cause they walked on tiny parts of it to get to their seasonal homes.
So no, I don't see the relevance, because I'm not discussing the concepts therein directly.
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.
The statute of limitations regime exists to provide stability. If you are harmed, you have some amount of time to make a claim.
Doing away with the statute of limitations would result in more injustice, not less.
Give the guy a break. It was a check of 700 bucks for exercising shares in a small (at the time) company that was not even public. Most people would probably not notice the error in the 1 year vs 4 year exercise schedule. Especially because 4 years is the standard, so that seems rather normal to agree to that even though it was an error and differing from the original offer.
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.
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.
This case has a 0% chance of anything because of the statute of limitations and no legitimate claim that would allow for decades-long tolling. He'd file suit, NVIDIA would file a motion to dismiss, the court would probably give him one chance to amend (to make an argument about tolling) and then it would be dismissed with prejudice.
If the full agreement had a prevailing-party attorney fee clause, this guy could end up paying NVIDIA's legal fees.
Is that not covered on contingency?
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.
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.
But no one listens to a 7 year old about investments! (Nor should they in most cases)
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:)
It was sufficiently mass market and popular that it was everywhere in Pacific Northwest (Portland to the Canadian border region) television and print media. It was enough of a cultural phenomenon that I remember seeing media coverage of people who lined up outside the retail boxed software store at midnight to purchase it.
Gonna listen to my kid when she’s 14, too, as it’s been a strategy that has paid off to date.
And then put the rest into Apple stock. I told him he was absolutely insane.
He sold about a quarter of it at some point in 2018, but is currently sitting on several million dollars of gain.
"This will never work as a currency, because of the max number of bitcoins it will inherently be deflationary, and the value will go up, which means that there will be a disincentive to spend it, because the value will just go up..."
Yep... Did not buy any.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943699
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060609
when they were valued around $0.30 each, or about $4 of Bitcoin then for $1M now.
Since then I've heavily revised my thinking. Primarily that I don't dismiss things as easily anymore. I try to focus on coming up with a reason to like it instead of disliking it.
I never sold.
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.
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.
But here's a hypothetical situation (unrealistic) that could change things. Let's say he came into possession of an internal document showing that someone at NVIDIA knew the grant said one year and chose to state 4 years to him anyway. Now he has an argument for fraud, and in California, the statute of limitations for fraud is 3 years from the date when you discover the fraud.
This type of thing could get him past a motion to dismiss provided that he brings the action within the 3 years after discovering the evidence of fraud. But nothing in the post claims this type of evidence. It just seems like a mistake was made and the guy, not knowing what NVIDIA would become, didn't even bother to check the documents he had at the time.
Cool story for the bar or grandkids.
From the looks of it, this firm primarily works on contingency, so it's not like they were doing anything out of the ordinary. They took a flyer on his "case" on the off chance that some correspondence might lead NVIDIA to throw a few bucks at this guy.
For what it’s worth, I just view it as part of the lottery of life. You win some, you lose some, you learn plenty.
Are you back in Sausalito now for good?
I hope NVIDIA's lawyers are reading this comment and filing a state bar complaint against your attorneys.
It would be different if they thought their claim had no merit, or were hiding evidence that it was a fraudulent claim. But here, it seems like it's just a slightly long-shot due to the timing. AFAICT there's no problem in pursuing claims like that, either for the client or the attorney.
If he had held on to those, they would be worth even more than the 9,375 shares he was entitled to but didn't exercise -- about $1.7 billion according to his math.
My guess is that he probably sold them when they were worth a lot less then they are today, and would have done the same with the remaining shares as well.
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.
I'm not that upset because I know for a fact I would have cashed out at the obvious peak of about $30.
The one that does cause the occasional pang of remorse is the million or so dogecoin I gave away, as by the time I realised it was worth anything at all it was worth more than my house
I used to work in pharma with a chemist whose medicinal chem team had invented 3 different multi-billion-$ prescription drugs.
He told me ... no one gives a shit about your patents unless you start to make money. when that happens, your competitors suddenly remember that they invented your drug before you did.
He spent a considerable amount of time being deposed by lawyers from rival big-pharma companies.
Isn’t that the entire point of agreeing to be paid in options instead of salary?
I don't have any inside info about this case obviously, but it's clear Nvidia would have ample motive to try to claw back whatever they could as mid 1996 was when they made their pivot after the disaster.
Again, not throwing around accusations here, just saying it may not be as cut and dried as "it was just an oops but everyone forgot about it for 30 years."
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 :-)
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".
Still massively sucks though. Not quite as bad as the guy who bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin but still a situation that would be impossible to ever get over.