Early NVIDIA Advisor Discovers Unexercised Stock Options from 1993

Early Involvement with NVIDIA

In 1993, an individual was invited to join NVIDIA's Technical Advisory Board by Jensen Huang. This invitation followed a meeting where the individual demonstrated biquadratic texture mapping, a technology that caught the attention of NVIDIA's founders, including Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky. The individual had previously worked with Curtis Priem at Sun Microsystems on the SPARCstation GX chip and ported Sense8's VR rendering to it.

Stock Option Grant and Initial Vesting

In September 1993, the advisor was granted 25,000 stock options, with a vesting schedule stipulating that all shares would vest upon the expiration of one year from the grant date, in quarterly installments. The advisor collaborated with NVIDIA on porting biquadratic texture mapping to their hardware and developed a VR demo for prototype NVIDIA hardware.

Impact of DirectX and Partial Exercise

When NVIDIA's NV1 shipped in 1995, Microsoft's DirectX toolkit did not support quadratic texture mapping, which negatively impacted NVIDIA's finances. In April 1996, the advisor received a letter from NVIDIA's CFO stating that 15,625 shares of the stock options had vested and required exercise. The advisor exercised these shares and subsequently moved to Tonga.

Discovery of Unvested Options

In 2024, while discussing NVIDIA's current market position, the advisor reviewed old documents. The review revealed that the original option agreement indicated full vesting of all 25,000 options over four quarters, not four years, suggesting that a portion of the options were not fully vested or exercised as per the initial terms.