Early NVIDIA Adviser Eric Gullichsen Says He Was Owed Millions in Shares, but the Clock Ran Out

Eric Gullichsen, an early technical adviser to Nvidia, says he recently uncovered a stock-option discrepancy dating back more than three decades — one that, had it been caught in time, might have been worth close to a billion dollars.

Gullichsen writes that he joined Nvidia's Technical Advisory Board in 1993 at the invitation of co-founder Jensen Huang, before Huang had adopted his now-famous leather jacket. The connection began with a meeting on Gullichsen's houseboat, the SS Vallejo, in Sausalito, California, attended by Huang and fellow Nvidia founders Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky. Gullichsen had previously collaborated with Priem when Priem worked at Sun Microsystems, and his virtual-reality company, Sense8 Corporation, had used Sun hardware in its rendering work.

According to Gullichsen, what drew Nvidia's founders to him was his fast implementation of biquadratic texture mapping, technology later detailed in a patent. Priem reportedly saw it as a way to differentiate Nvidia's first product, the NV1, from competitors. Gullichsen says he briefly worked with Priem to port the technology to early Nvidia hardware and wrote code for an Intel-sponsored virtual-reality demo shown at the Guggenheim SoHo in 1993.

In September of that year, Gullichsen was granted 25,000 stock options under an agreement stating the shares would vest in quarterly installments over one year. When the NV1 launched in 1995, Microsoft's newly released DirectX toolkit declined to support quadratic texture mapping, favoring triangles instead — a decision Gullichsen says badly hurt Nvidia's finances and led to major layoffs.

In April 1996, while Gullichsen was living in Tonga, Nvidia's then-CFO informed him that 15,625 of his options had vested and needed to be exercised. He did so and set the matter aside for nearly three decades.

The issue resurfaced in 2024, Gullichsen says, when he was watching Nvidia dominate financial news and decided to revisit his old paperwork. Comparing the 1996 letter to his original 1993 agreement, he concluded that only 62.5% of his options — the amount consistent with a four-year vesting schedule — had been treated as vested, when the signed agreement specified full vesting within one year. By his calculation, that left 9,375 options unaccounted for, which, after Nvidia's cumulative 480-to-1 stock splits, would now amount to roughly 4.5 million shares.

Gullichsen retained attorneys Allan Steyer of Steyer Lowenthal and Chris Burke of Korein Tillery to pursue the claim. He says Nvidia did not dispute the authenticity of the original option agreement but argued the claim was barred by the statute of limitations. After roughly a year of correspondence between the two sides' legal teams, Gullichsen says he asked his attorneys to seek a settlement meeting rather than continue indefinitely. At that meeting, he says, Nvidia's outside counsel effectively told them to pursue litigation if they wished.

Ultimately, Gullichsen and his attorneys concluded that decades of inaction made the claim unlikely to survive a motion to dismiss, and they did not pursue the matter further.

Gullichsen says he is sharing the story as a cautionary tale about the limits of contractual protections over long stretches of time, and he says he remains, in his words, "sanguine, and amused" about the outcome. Nvidia has not publicly commented on the account, and the details above reflect Gullichsen's own retelling of events; they have not been independently verified against company or court records.