Eric Gullichsen, who served as an early advisor to NVIDIA starting in 1993, claims he is owed approximately $1 billion in company stock due to a dispute over when his stock options were meant to vest.
According to Gullichsen’s account, he was invited to join NVIDIA’s Technical Advisory Board in September 1993 by Jensen Huang and granted 25,000 options. The original option agreement specified that shares would “vest upon the expiration of one year from Grant Date” in quarterly installments.
Gullichsen’s work with NVIDIA focused on texture mapping technology. He had previously collaborated with Curtis Priem at Sun Microsystems and implemented bilinear texture mapping using the Intel i750 DVI chip. His biquadratic texture mapping implementation caught Priem’s attention and led to the NVIDIA founders visiting Gullichsen’s houseboat in Sausalito for a demonstration. Gullichsen subsequently worked on porting the texture mapping technology to NVIDIA’s first product, the NV1, and wrote code for a VR demo shown at the Guggenheim SoHo in 1993.
In April 1996, NVIDIA’s CFO informed Gullichsen that 15,625 of his options had vested and required him to exercise them. Gullichsen did so and then set the matter aside.
Decades later, in 2024, Gullichsen reviewed his original option agreement and concluded that a discrepancy existed. According to his interpretation, the agreement specified quarterly vesting over one year, meaning all 25,000 shares should have vested before the 1996 letter was sent. However, NVIDIA’s CFO and outside counsel Cooley had treated the vesting schedule as occurring over four years instead.
Gullichsen engaged attorneys to pursue the matter. After approximately one year of correspondence between his legal team and NVIDIA’s counsel, both sides met to discuss settlement. NVIDIA did not dispute the authenticity of the original option agreement but argued that Gullichsen’s claims were time-barred by the statute of limitations.
Gullichsen and his attorneys ultimately concluded that the thirty-year delay in raising the issue made success unlikely, particularly in surviving a motion to dismiss. The dispute remained unresolved.
Key facts
- Gullichsen was granted 25,000 NVIDIA stock options in September 1993 as a Technical Advisory Board member
- The original agreement specified quarterly vesting over one year, according to Gullichsen
- NVIDIA treated the vesting as occurring over four years in a 1996 letter
- NVIDIA did not dispute the agreement’s authenticity but claimed the dispute was time-barred
- Stock splits have increased Gullichsen’s claimed missing 9,375 shares to 4.5 million shares