I was an early advisor to NVIDIA in 1993, and recently discovered I'm owed about a billion dollars in stock. In September 1993, Jensen invited me to join NVIDIA's Technical Advisory Board and granted me 25,000 options with a one-year vesting schedule. Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky joined a meeting on my houseboat, the SS Vallejo, in Sausalito.

My fast implementation of biquadratic texture mapping caught their attention for NVIDIA's NV1 product. When the NV1 shipped in 1995, Microsoft's decision to exclude quadratic texture mapping support devastated NVIDIA's finances. In April 1996, NVIDIA's CFO informed me that 15,625 shares had vested and I needed to exercise them.

Fast-forward to 2024, I discovered my options should have vested fully under the original one-year schedule, not the four-year schedule NVIDIA claimed. After 30 years, my 9,375 missing shares are now 4,500,000 shares due to stock splits. I engaged attorneys Allan Steyer and Chris Burke to pursue the claim, but after a year of legal exchanges, we concluded the statute of limitations bars our case.

NVIDIA didn't dispute the agreement's authenticity, only that the claims were time-barred. The meeting was professional, but Cooley's response was essentially 'so sue us.'.