alt Hacker NewsAuthor 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.
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I don't have the same story but I did turn down a job offer from Nvidia in '97 which I think about from time to time.
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.
You understand expected value right?
I'm not mathemagician, but a tiny fraction of a billion with a b dollars is worth filing.
If nothing else it gives us all an exciting news cycle.
Thanks for sharing your story in straightforward detail. Do you believe, in an ethical sense (independent of the legal sense), that you are owed roughly a billion dollars?
It sounds like you were rather negligent as well. You didn't care to have any inkling of memory of the vesting schedule in 1996, or just to double check and "wrap up" the financial details of that agreement after the work was done?
It does seem somewhat suspect to elide mention of what became of the shares that you did own, and that you only re-noticed Nvidia in 2024. Every 14 year old PC nerd/gamer knew that name in 2001. It is quite a feat of negligence to wait that long to dig this up.
You seem like a decent person, and I do believe that you are justly owed something, but I must admit that I find this to be a depressing tale of rich people spinning wheels for naught. A modest inflation-adjusted multiple of the original value of the options seems reasonable.
Before anyone accuses me of shilling or white-knighting for a major corporation, I don't have any broader sympathy for them and I would generally take the side of David over Goliath, which I think some commenters are making this out to be, but it seems more like Mini-Goliath and Mega-Goliath are bikeshedding and David has no stake in the matter.
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.
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!
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What happened to the $1.7 billion of shares that you did get by exercising your options?