Author 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.
What happened to the $1.7 billion of shares that you did get by exercising your options?
This is my question. The post states “I received a call that all options had vested so I need to exercise them, so I did”.
Ok? So the author should have those shares to his name?
Clearly he sold them early, and would have sold these extra ones too if he'd exercised them. It's just weird that he's trying to hide the fact by failing to mention it and ignoring questions about it.
It's OK, dude. We've all been there. You're in good company with Masayoshi Son on this one.
Yeah I noticed the author is replying to a lot of questions except the question of what happened to the shares that were exercised
Or the author doesn’t want anyone reading along on the internet to realize that he’s a multi-billionaire.
Which of the possibilities is more likely is anyone’s guess.
So someone who was previously unknown brought all this attention on themselves while being a coy billionaire? We live in strange times so it's possible but doubtful.
Hey, Eric! What happened to the island? https://time.com/archive/6735546/hes-the-master-of-his-domai...
Are you back in Sausalito now for good?
For those who might wonder (like I did), this article was published June 6, 1999.
> And the process of discovery would be very costly for NVIDIA with depositions from many executives who have better things to do.
You're almost certainly either misrepresenting or misunderstanding what your attorneys told you.
You would never get to discovery with your complaint. If you sued, NVIDIA would win a motion to dismiss in federal court based on your claim being time-barred.
You have no basis to support decades-long tolling. The possibility that, say, NVIDIA knew what it told you was wrong 30 years ago is not good enough under federal pleading standards to get you to discovery. You would need sufficient evidence to support a claim that NVIDIA intentionally lied, which you obviously don't have otherwise you would have mentioned it in your post.
State court (California) has a few wrinkles but the result ends up being the same.
Basically the legal system is designed to prevent fishing expeditions on decades-old claims. You cannot have possession of an agreement and then run to the courts asking for a billion dollars because you failed for three decades to read it carefully.
If you are past the statute of limitations, the bar is intentionally virtually impossibly high.
As I understand it they thought there was a chance Nvidia would settle, since the lawyers worked on contingency instead of telling him not to waste his time
By this guy's account, his attorneys sent and responded to a number of letters and arranged for a meeting with NVIDIA counsel. So you have to put it in context: this didn't demand a whole lot of time and effort, and they never actually filed a lawsuit.
From the looks of it, this firm primarily works on contingency, so it's not like they were doing anything out of the ordinary. They took a flyer on his "case" on the off chance that some correspondence might lead NVIDIA to throw a few bucks at this guy.
> You would need sufficient evidence to support a claim that NVIDIA intentionally lied, which you obviously don't have otherwise you would have mentioned it in your post.
Would even an intentional lie act to to reset the limitation period here? The hypothetical lie wasn't a deep secret exposed by some whistleblower, it came to light by... reading the vesting agreement. Since AFAIK limitation periods run from "know or ought to have known," I can't see a viable construction to keep the dispute live after 30 years.
Yes, his possession of all the agreements for 30+ is what makes this so difficult.
But here's a hypothetical situation (unrealistic) that could change things. Let's say he came into possession of an internal document showing that someone at NVIDIA knew the grant said one year and chose to state 4 years to him anyway. Now he has an argument for fraud, and in California, the statute of limitations for fraud is 3 years from the date when you discover the fraud.
This type of thing could get him past a motion to dismiss provided that he brings the action within the 3 years after discovering the evidence of fraud. But nothing in the post claims this type of evidence. It just seems like a mistake was made and the guy, not knowing what NVIDIA would become, didn't even bother to check the documents he had at the time.
Cool story for the bar or grandkids.
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.
As a 14 year old in 1995 I advised family to put the proceeds from the sale of a house into Microsoft stock, which based on a cursory search would have ended up as some absurd number. One online calculator I'm looking at says $204,000 of stock in 1994 would be $41.2 million today after multiple splits and increase in share value. But nobody takes investment advice from 14 year olds who've spent too much time reading USENET and talking to people on IRC.
Even if they'd only put a fraction of it into MSFT and held it until only 2003 or 2004 it would have been far more than enough to retire on comfortably.
Last year, I got an email from a college friend who reminded me that I'd told him to buy MSFT shares in 1986. Neither he nor I did, so I file this in my 'Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda' file, alongside similar stories about Cisco in 1991, Netflix in 2001, and Bitcoin in 2011.
I remember looking into Bitcoin in 2012, and thinking:
"This will never work as a currency, because of the max number of bitcoins it will inherently be deflationary, and the value will go up, which means that there will be a disincentive to spend it, because the value will just go up..."
Yep... Did not buy any.
I don't need to remember it, here's my comments about Bitcoin on HN in Nov 2010:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943699
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060609
when they were valued around $0.30 each, or about $4 of Bitcoin then for $1M now.
I could have used BTC to buy into the ethereum ICO and I made up every excuse under the sun that a young kid who wrote shit python code could never compete with the gold rock.
Since then I've heavily revised my thinking. Primarily that I don't dismiss things as easily anymore. I try to focus on coming up with a reason to like it instead of disliking it.
I never sold.
I remember looking at AMD stock when it was $3.50 to put some money in. Never did because there was a real chance they weren’t going to make it but here we are, shouldn’t have looked at what they’re at now, rough.
When i was 7 in 1997 my parents had a little stock ticker widget on their desktop that showed how much their stock investments were worth. Obviously it was a long time ago but I remember often seeing MSFT going red. I didn't know much about anything at the time but I knew that the windows machine i were playing on was made by Microsoft. So I asked my mom what red means and she said it means the company is not doing well and they will sell it. I remember saying something like "but Microsoft is on every computer at school I think you should buy more"
But no one listens to a 7 year old about investments! (Nor should they in most cases, i think i told her to buy more yahoo too)
I dont know how much they held or how much they sold, or if they even sold at all, just a fun memory triggered by your comment:)
As I can recall from my memory, my suggestion was also prompted by the marketing hype machine surrounding the retail boxed release of Windows 95 as a hot new thing. And by that point in time it had become quite "common" for middle class households to have a desktop PC which had a CD-ROM drive, sound card, decent "multimedia" capabilities. And people were legitimately eager to upgrade to Windows 95.
It was sufficiently mass market and popular that it was everywhere in Pacific Northwest (Portland to the Canadian border region) television and print media. It was enough of a cultural phenomenon that I remember seeing media coverage of people who lined up outside the retail boxed software store at midnight to purchase it.
Oh how times have changed :) i actively avoided upgrading to Win 11 before I decided to jump to Linux for home, and im still not on Tahoe for my work computer
The same can be said for most tech companies during the dotcom boom.
Hindsight as they say is 2020 and in early 2020 I bought Nvidia shares as I figured a lot people wouldn't have much to do except play games, sold them in 2022 as I thought there won't be many people upgrading their rigs as things got back to normal and there won't be much demand for graphics cards, made money, could have made more, oh well!
I beat you to it by eight years. I was 16 in 1987 when I asked my father to lend me $5K to invest in Microsoft. It was at ~$0.30/share. That would have been around $8.5M today. He said no. To be fair though, he likely said no simply because he didn't have it to lend me.
as a 13 year old i wanted my mom to take 50 bucks from my summer job to take into btc. BTC was at .06 cent back at the time. Even if i just held it until BTC reached 20$, i wouldnt be working 9-5 right now but rather 9-1.
I had like 10btc in mtgox when they cut and ran, and never bothered pursuing it as it was “oh well” money.
You never know, in another universe it could have still ended up as nothing.
From some reading up, you've lost nothing by not pursuing yet. Japan's Civil Rehabilitation Act requires the funds belonging to unclaimed accounts to be preserved and eventually deposited with the court, instead of being shared amongst other creditors. There is likely an internal placeholder claim number holding the proper amount waiting for you to convincingly attach your name to it. This is the world of law not programming, so I wouldn't let forgotten passwords or closed email accounts deter me if I were you.
I'd look into it anyway - I believe a lot of people got their BTC or a certain amount of money back as part of a class action or whatever lawsuit.
A friend sold his house in 2005. He was a huge Apple fanboy. With the proceeds that were left after he paid off his mortgage, he splurged on a quadcore Power Mac G5, and a new top of the range PowerBook.
And then put the rest into Apple stock. I told him he was absolutely insane.
He sold about a quarter of it at some point in 2018, but is currently sitting on several million dollars of gain.
I still listen to 14 year old me when it comes to investments, like when in 2016 they whispered “GPUs are going to be hot shit because of this CUDA stuff. And games.” in my middle aged brain.
Gonna listen to my kid when she’s 14, too, as it’s been a strategy that has paid off to date.
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.
They treated it as 4 years, not 4 quarters, so nothing was missing in the books.
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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.
Expected value usually assumes these things happen in isolation, and they don't. They are good at representing the isolated upside, but rarely do they account for the downside.
In this case a 1% chance of $1bn represents an expected value of $10m. If you accept the cost of litigation as $10m (for example), then your expected value is actually zero. And if you think about the outcomes of the 99% of cases, bankruptcy is hugely painful.
One can always play silly games with expected value. If the "value" of a human life is $10m (supposedly a figure used by some governments), you could pose all sorts of expected value scenarios, but when it's your life that all goes out of the window.
> In this case a 1% chance of $1bn represents an expected value of $10m.
This case has a 0% chance of anything because of the statute of limitations and no legitimate claim that would allow for decades-long tolling. He'd file suit, NVIDIA would file a motion to dismiss, the court would probably give him one chance to amend (to make an argument about tolling) and then it would be dismissed with prejudice.
If the full agreement had a prevailing-party attorney fee clause, this guy could end up paying NVIDIA's legal fees.
The straightforward expected value calculation doesn't account for nonlinear utility in a one-off event. Gaining a billion dollars is not a thousand times better than losing a million dollars.
yea my thought exactly. especially if the lawsuit expenses are on contingency, what is there to lose by filing?
Presumably the other sides expenses?
Would they be on the hook for same?
Is that not covered on contingency?
I empathise. I won’t go into detail here, but 20 years ago I built something that went on to be a major commercial success - after I had been coerced into signing over ownership at the pointy end of a lawyer. For not dissimilar reasons, it’s a lost cause at this point.
For what it’s worth, I just view it as part of the lottery of life. You win some, you lose some, you learn plenty.
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.
"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?"
Give the guy a break. It was a check of 700 bucks for exercising shares in a small (at the time) company that was not even public. Most people would probably not notice the error in the 1 year vs 4 year exercise schedule. Especially because 4 years is the standard, so that seems rather normal to agree to that even though it was an error and differing from the original offer.
> A modest inflation-adjusted multiple of the original value of the options seems reasonable.
But why? The OP (apparently) owns some of Nvidia. It seems reasonable to get that ownership recognised.
The simple reason is that if we allow litigating over ownership based on 30-year-old facts, nothing is ever settled. Maybe your house, with its 30 year mortgage paid off, actually belongs to someone else. Maybe that kid you shoved in 3rd grade comes back 40 years later and asserts their lifelong earnings were reduced by $100m because of the trauma.
The statute of limitations regime exists to provide stability. If you are harmed, you have some amount of time to make a claim.
Doing away with the statute of limitations would result in more injustice, not less.
While not a letter of the law argument, there's a spirit of the law argument here that comes from the ideas like adverse posession and the statute of limitations. The OP didn't use or even worry about the options/shares for 30 some years: the time to speak up and assert ownership was literal decades ago.
If someone has built a house on a remote lot you claim to own, while making property improvements and paying taxes, but you've never visited for 30 years; are you really entitled to swoop in and seize their house now?
In civil law countries, you would be. That's why Europe has the reputation for being tangled in bureaucracy. Every possible risk has to be discharged before you can do anything at all.
Physical land is quite different. And if squatting is legal, it makes a kind of tax of ownership and also means that any registry is invalid.
If you are saying the physical house only and not the land that is different yes. Someone who can move the house obviously should still own the house. Trespassing usually doesn't invalidate ownership of all your belongings.
More important is the meta concept of like we write confusing contracts and then execute them and we agree on an end date (all transactions done) and then informally and implicitly we agree that if anything was wrong you only have z years after close date to fix it.
This is kind of thing where big people can do it themselves and other people perhaps need a regulated entity to review their docs ... Like mortgages and what not.
The interesting thing here would be if the IRS decides to have an opinion ...
> ; are you really entitled to swoop in and seize their house now?
In the country i am, yes. If you have the paperwork.
Yes, you are entitled. This has been a big point of contention in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. A lot of the property was nationalized, their former owners defected, and then the heirs came back decades later requesting their property back. In some cases where there was a house, there was now a 15-story building.
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi
One man's negligence is another man's HODL... Buying and holding an asset is a completely sound investment strategy.
I dont think the land ownership analogy is quite as simple as you're making it out to be, given that the US and many other countries are literally founded on "someone else's land" and the entire Palestine / Israel issue.
The US is not founded on 'someone else's land'. Small portions of the US perhaps, yes, and treaties and courts work through that. Most Indians were hunter/gatherers, and suggesting that because someone roves through massive tracts of land is ownership, is beyond weird.
Seasonal camping sites make sense, more from a 'our land' perspective.
And naturally any signed treaties should be honoured.
You may say "But, they were here first!", yet that's quite false. Native Americans invaded as well, either subsuming or slaughtering existing populations as they did so. Further, Native Americans warred, fought, killed each other, just as Europeans, Middle Easterners, and everyone else on the planet did. After all, human is human is human, and that's (sadly) what humans do.
And if you look at every other country on the planet, the precise same is true. Locals pushed aside as newcomers invaded, whether the UK, Scotland, Russia, Germany, the Middle East, literally every place on the planet.
There is no peoples, no country, no ethic group, which has not over time invaded another.
There is no one alive today, that does not stand on land once called 'home' by another.
You may wonder why I say this, but instead of discussing a land plot inside a Western country taken over by another citizen, you immediately dove into Native American rights and a Middle Eastern conflict for some inexplicable reason.
Under contract law, should the treaties be honored if the other party weren’t capable of full understanding of what they were signing? I agree with you, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
This is a complex and nuanced point, but there is complexity and such nuance elsewhere, too. For example, I often see "trillions of dollars of $city land are in dispute!" then citing that a settlement of immense magnitude should result.
Of course, the land in question was effectively open forest/plains, isolated with no cities and almost no one living on or around it. And if it remained as so, by todays standards, would be worth often dollars per acre. Meanwhile, we're attributing dollar amounts to land which only became valuable, because it was developed by some means.
While I am not directly answering your question, I frankly find the 'cut off' period to be quite weird. Everyone on the planet has ancestors which have been displaced, AND have displaced peoples. We're both the conquerors and the conquered. For example, I have Scottish heritage. Where's the payment for the land the English stole from my ancestors? And for the English, where's the payment that the Romans owe, for the land taken from those in the isles 2k years ago? Or the French owe, when they invaded and hung out for a while?
Individuals were displaced, entire groupings of people slaughter or literally decimated.
It goes on and on and on, back through time, all owing all. Yet that is completely ignored, including endless land grabs all over the planet even over the last 2 centuries, but... oh well, significant compensation and land returns are only really given to those in North America.
I believe in fairness. And to me, this seems... off somehow.
It's because the moral standing for these measures is primitive tribalism, and neither principled nor disinterested.
Well I think you just proved my point on why land ownership is not a simple analogy :)
> Most Indians were hunter/gatherers, and suggesting that because someone roves through massive tracts of land is ownership, is beyond weird.
It is not "beyond weird." It is a well-defended position in contemporary political theory and it has had many prominent defenders for hundreds of years. For example, in the 1790s, Immanuel Kant wrote:
It can still be asked whether, when neither nature nor chance but just our own will brings us into the neighborhood of a people that holds out no prospect of a civil union with it, we should not be authorized to found colonies, by force if need be, in order to establish a civil union with them and bring these human beings (savages) into a rightful condition (as with the American Indians, the Hottentots and the inhabitants of New Holland); or (which is not much better), to found colonies by fraudulent purchase of their land, and so become owners of their land, making use of our superiority without regard for their first possession. Should we not be authorized to do this, especially since nature itself (which abhors a vacuum) seems to demand it, and great expanses of land in other parts of the world, which are now splendidly populated, would have otherwise remained uninhabited by civilized people or, indeed, would have to remain forever uninhabited, so that the end of creation would have been frustrated? But it is easy to see through this veil of injustice (Jesuitism), which would sanction any means to good ends. Such a way of acquiring land is therefore to be repudiated.
I see no relevance in your quoted text, with respect to what I said in my post. And the premise I cited is indeed beyond weird.
Note that I said seasonal camping sites make sense. And I said treaties make sense. I simply said 'wandering about' doesn't convey ownership, aka 'possession'. To take such a notion to the extreme, imagine a grouping of 4 who rove all around the entirety of Canada and the US through their lifetime. You could easily do this over 20 to 30 years. Should those 4 be attributed possession? As owners of that entire landmass via treaty, or just prevent any use of that land by anyone else?
Absurd. And it is equally absurd that land used for travel between two campsites, basically as a road, should mysteriously convey ownership/possession too.
For example, typically there were winter and summer camp sites in the US. Yet when not doing so, Natives would often 'rove' from one of the other, think 'migration'. Yet I've seen ridiculous assertions that someone basically using the land as a road between two campsites, to conveys ownership. Sheer nonsense.
Your argument in the post up-thread appears to be that because the Native Americans did not cultivate or make use of the land in any Western sense, they have no claim to ownership. The Kant quote attempts to repudiate this by stating that it makes no difference whether we consider the Native Americans' use of the land to be ineffective: their deprivation of it is still an injustice and, when it comes to injustice, the ends cannot justify the means.
I don't find Kant's position at all convincing, mostly because the two parties' understandings of the concept of "ownership" were not mutually intelligible (possession vs usufruction). However, the quote does have relevance to your post.
The key here is 'use'. Kant, while obviously not some gospel to be held to any form of authority, is making a point about differences in culture and sure, as you said, use. However, my point wasn't disputing usage at all. Living on it. Hunting on it. Working the land.
However no view exists in a vacuum, and I will indelibly view my example of a group of 4 as a valid statement, about the absurdities of 'walked on the land once in my life, to get to my summer/winter home', compared to some claims of a tribe of a few hundred people, somehow owning hundreds of millions of acres of land, just cause they walked on tiny parts of it to get to their seasonal homes.
So no, I don't see the relevance, because I'm not discussing the concepts therein directly.
Ethically? Difficult question. I may not be a decent person as you posit, but I do like to think of myself as reasonable. I certainly never expected NVIDIA to say "aw shucks" and write me a billion dollar check. At the last lawyer meeting we proposed to settle for a far smaller number, which both sides agreed was reasonable. A number not picked out of a hat, but based on rather complex nuances such as the likelihood I would have sold etc.etc. derived from much legal thought. And they still made the call to say nope. I think it is perfectly clear from the options contract what the vesting term was. And certainly I erred in not realizing this earlier, before the statute of limitations tolled. Though in 1996 the stock was priced at 5 cents, so not something I paid enough attention to, not having the foresight or perhaps the necessary faith in Jensen's perseverance, intelligence, and luck. Hindsight is cheap.
A good framework would have been this: for the options you received, let's see what you did. Did you trade them 3 years later, resulting in $X amount? Then, let's assume you would have done the same with the missing stock options. I would guess that the amount would be really negligible - in the tens or hundreds of thousands, at most. Ethically, I think this is where I would consider it fair to both parties.
Then, you neglected this for ~30 years. It's fair to say that Nvidia doesn't owe you anything at this point.
Wouldn't be surprised if you weren't the only person with equity in nvidia around that time with similar paperwork errors, were that to be the case if word got around they settled with you, more people would start coming forward for the easy money.
If I were you I would refrain from offering thoughts like this publicly. You don't want to hav any of this used against you.
It is clear he has decided to not pursue this any further.
That doesn’t mean we should encourage him.
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.
He did exercise those options.
Are you a lawyer?
Are you going to ask this question to everyone who writes anything in this discussion?
It's beside the point whether he's a lawyer. He's not your lawyer, that's for sure. The "no medical nor legal advice but otherwise you can advise anything" idea is beyond stupid.
Judge advice on its merit, not by what category it's in.
Knowing whether a lawyer believes a legal theory helps judge the merit of that theory, because civil law conventions are what lawyers (including judges) believe.
It's the internet, anyone can say they're a lawyer. If you take legal advice from an internet stranger because they say they're a lawyer, well i might have a bridge to sell you
Fun fact: it's a crime to say you're a lawyer if you aren't one.
Now you're pulling facts out of your non-lawyer pocket like it's actually (universally) true.
Which jurisdiction? Under what circumstances? Who enforces these purported rules?
I don't need to ask whether you're a lawyer, you're simply out of your depth I'm afraid.
> Fun fact: it's a crime to say you're a lawyer if you aren't one.
This is not an absolute fact.
It depends entirely on the commenter's jurisdiction.
It being a crime or not should have no bearing on whether or not you should take legal advice from a self-purported lawyer on a public forum.
Is that legal advice?
Are you a lawyer?
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!
(1) Not a certainty that it would be dismissed. Just a high enough likelihood that after hundreds of hours or work with my lawyers (who were excellent) and many rounds of letters and meetings with NVIDIA counsel - all very professional - it wasn't worth our time to pursue further. I have other things to do with my brief adventure on this planet. (2) Feel? At this point just sort of amused by it all. (3) Read the contracts. Carefully. In 1996 NVIDIA was 3 years before IPO and nearly bankrupt, and I was busy. Too busy to read the contracts.
Read the contracts. Carefully.
May I use your example if I give a talk at some point trying to impress upon the audience why they should actually read agreements before they sign them?
It's already out there. You don't need to ask.
Consider that many people do things that they don't need to do!
It’s considerate, polite, to ask instead of assuming the author would be ok with that
I find it weird, not polite, personally. Polite would be to not bother them and just use it anyway without drawing their attention to yourself unnecessarily.
Different norms, perhaps.
Why would you assume they would be bothered? They are actively discussing with us all on an open forum. And can just ignore if they don’t want to engage
I didn't assume they would be bothered. I view asking them as performatively seeking attention and therefore bothersome. It's a norm about the general situation not a prediction about the individual one.
The author has published on the topic and engaged in conversations on HN about the topic.
They're clearly ok with the topic being discussed and shared.
> I have other things to do with my brief adventure on this planet.
Thank you for that simple wisdom for today.
Thanks for taking your time to write the comment, I appreciate it and for the life lesson to actually read the contracts, carefully. I imagine that it doesn't become a priority or we are too busy for it until we suddenly aren't (seems like its a lot closer to hygiene/health)
Perhaps we can call it as a form of legal hygiene so as to impart the habit to the next generation. (Please feel free to correct me or tell me if there's a more proper term to what I am referring as, as well but I like the intuition/metaphor of treating it as hygiene.)
Thank you and have a nice day :-D
> At best: you actually win money. At worst: you don't
No, at worst the court orders you to pay for the time spent by lawyers working for the company you sued. This option exists to nudge that calculation “it’s a million to one chance, but it might just work” away from filing lawsuits just for the hell of it.
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Your lawyers told you they were representing you, not because they thought your claim could prevail, but because you might be able to get into discovery, at which point the cost to NVIDIA in time and hassle would force them to settle?
I hope NVIDIA's lawyers are reading this comment and filing a state bar complaint against your attorneys.
Why? Thinking you won't prevail doesn't mean you can't try.
It would be different if they thought their claim had no merit, or were hiding evidence that it was a fraudulent claim. But here, it seems like it's just a slightly long-shot due to the timing. AFAICT there's no problem in pursuing claims like that, either for the client or the attorney.