Road to Duke
Woodside is the rich-on-the-rocks Silicon Valley town in the foothills behind Stanford, where the streets are unpaved by design and the houses sit far back from the road on horse pasture. There aren't a lot of NBA-track basketball recruits coming out of Woodside. There are a lot of Stanford prerequisites, lots of country-club tennis players, lots of squash courts. Simpson wasn't built to be a Woodside kid. He was built to be a Duke basketball player — or at least a Duke basketball player's idea of what a Duke basketball player should look like: 6-foot-4, lanky, smart, a long-range shooter with the kind of work-ethic-over-talent profile that recruiting services rank at zero stars and assistant coaches notice three minutes into the first scrimmage.
Simpson attended St. Francis High School in Mountain View, the Catholic prep about 15 minutes north of Woodside whose basketball program had produced two NBA draftees in the 1990s. He played there through his senior year of high school, then did what an under-recruited West Coast prep guard with Division I ambitions sometimes does — he packed for a postgraduate year at New Hampton School, a small boarding prep in the New Hampshire woods that, by the late 1990s, was on its way to becoming one of the country's premier basketball prep finishing schools. The New Hampton program would eventually produce Noah Vonleh, Sam Cassell Jr., countless ACC and Big Ten recruits, and would help establish the modern PG-year basketball path. Simpson was one of the early arrivals on that path. The year was 1997. He used it to refine his shot, fill out his frame, and chase the school he wanted.
That school was Duke. Mike Krzyzewski had no scholarship to offer — the 1997 recruiting class was already loaded with the eventual NBA careers of Elton Brand, William Avery, and Shane Battier — but the coaching staff did have the one thing Simpson cared about: a roster spot for the right walk-on. He'd practice every day against the best players in the country. He'd travel with the team. He'd be on the same bench as Coach K. The basketball would be the best he'd ever play. The seasons would matter. The roster spot, on a team like that, was the scholarship. Simpson took it.
At Duke
Simpson's freshman year was the transition year — Trajan Langdon, Steve Wojciechowski, and Roshown McLeod still on the roster from the senior class, with Brand, Avery, Battier, and the rest of the heralded 1997 class as freshmen. He played in 15 games for 28 total minutes — barely seven minutes a month — scored 4 total points, shot 1-for-5 from the floor and 0-for-1 from three. Duke went 32-4 and lost to Kentucky 86-84 in the South Regional final. Simpson was on the bench when Wojo cried into Coach K's chest at the end. He had earned the walk-on equivalent of a Coach K freshman experience: a Sweet 16, a Final Four near-miss, three of the best practice rotations in college basketball, and a body that had grown about ten pounds over the year by trying to keep up with Brand in the weight room.
His sophomore year — 1998-99 — was the Final Four year. Brand, Avery, Battier, and Carrawell led a 37-2 team that finished undefeated in the ACC, reached the National Championship game in St. Petersburg, and lost 77-74 to a UConn team featuring Richard Hamilton's 27 points and Khalid El-Amin's late dagger. Simpson played in 26 games for 80 minutes — about three minutes per appearance — and scored 11 total points. He had a season-high six minutes in a 102-77 rout of Princeton in late November. He hit one three-pointer all year. He was on the bench in St. Pete on March 29, 1999, watching teammates he'd practiced against every day for two years lose by three to a UConn team that had set out to beat them at their own game. Junior year (1999-2000) followed a similar pattern: 17 games, 46 minutes, seven total points. Sweet 16 loss to Florida.
And then came the captaincy. In January 2001, midway through what would become Simpson's senior year, Mike Krzyzewski made a decision that surprised everyone — including, by all accounts, the kid it was about. Coach K told Simpson he was making him a senior tri-captain for the rest of the season, alongside Shane Battier and Nate James. The official three-captain announcement caught fans off guard; it had never been entirely clear that Simpson was even on the inside track to play a senior-year role given his career statistical line (career 23 points in 58 games entering the season). But Krzyzewski had been watching something for four years that the box score couldn't capture. "I was really honored and it has been a dream come true for me," Simpson told the Duke Chronicle that spring. "Being captain of Duke basketball is amazing."
What had earned it, according to the people in the gym every day, was the small things. "J.D. has earned it just as much as any captain before him," assistant coach Steve Wojciechowski — himself a former Coach's-Award captain three years earlier — told the Chronicle. "Just because he's a walk-on, nothing was given to him; this wasn't a charity thing. Coach K and Duke basketball is not about charity. This is something J.D. has earned and he deserves." Krzyzewski's own words on the decision were more direct: "J.D. has the respect of everybody even though he doesn't play, which is indicative of his leadership ability." Both Battier and James, by Simpson's account, had explicitly encouraged Coach K to make the move.
The 2000-01 season unfolded into the championship: 35-4 record, ACC Tournament title, undefeated through the NCAA Tournament. Simpson played in 22 games, scored 19 points, hit four three-pointers including a 2-for-4 night against Bowling Green and a 1-for-4 game against South Carolina, and led the bench's celebration as Duke beat Maryland 95-84 in the Final Four after trailing by 22 to reach the championship game. He logged 71 minutes across the season — the most of his career. On April 2, 2001, in the Metrodome in Minneapolis, Casey Sanders started at center, Shane Battier played all 40 minutes and won Final Four Most Outstanding Player, Mike Dunleavy hit five three-pointers, Carlos Boozer dropped 12 points and 12 rebounds off the bench, and J.D. Simpson — senior tri-captain, four-year walk-on, 6-foot-4 Bay Area Sociology major — watched the final seconds tick off as Duke beat Arizona 82-72 to win the program's third national championship.
Two days later, when the team returned to Cameron for the homecoming celebration in front of 5,000 students, Krzyzewski introduced the team's senior co-captains to the crowd. Battier spoke first. Then Simpson. "You need to congratulate yourselves," he told the seniors in the audience, who had spent four years watching this team win 133 games — one more than the previous record set by Kentucky — "because you are the winningest class in college basketball ever." In May 2001, J.D. Simpson, Shane Battier, Nate James, and Ryan Caldbeck — Duke's other four-year walk-on — graduated from Duke University together. Simpson with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. Duke was named NCAA champion of the winningest senior class in modern history. Bleacher Report would later rank Simpson among the top ten NCAA basketball walk-ons of all time.
After Duke
Simpson stayed in Durham. The Duke degree, the Brotherhood network, and the early-2000s biotech boom were aligning in a way that would shape the next quarter-century of his life. He moved into medical devices — the segment of healthcare where engineering, sales, regulatory work, and clinical evidence all braid together into a long company-building puzzle, and where his profile (Duke degree, leader of teams, comfortable in high-pressure rooms full of brilliant specialists) translated immediately. He started in commercial roles. He learned how a Series A startup translates a clinical idea into a commercial launch. He learned how the FDA submission, the pivotal trial, the sales force build-out, the reimbursement battle, and the institutional fundraising round all have to be choreographed across years.
Over the next twenty years he would do that work at multiple companies, including a long stretch at Avinger Inc. — the Silicon Valley peripheral artery disease company founded by Dr. John Simpson (the famed Stanford-trained interventional cardiologist, no relation) — where J.D. rose to a co-president-level role and helped lead the company through its 2015 IPO on the Nasdaq. He then moved to INSIGHTEC, the Israeli MR-guided focused ultrasound company best known for its noninvasive Parkinson's disease treatment, as Vice President of Marketing beginning April 2020 — guiding the commercial rollout through the pandemic years. He was CEO of two earlier-stage companies before that — including a 2019-2020 stint as CEO of Certus Critical Care, the company he would return to lead again six years later. By the 2020s he had participated in raising more than $200 million in private and public capital, contributed to two IPOs and one acquisition, and built commercial organizations from scratch at five different companies. Along the way he founded Recreation, a side-project venture, and stayed involved with outdoor leadership programs (NOLS — the National Outdoor Leadership School) and as a keynote speaker on the topic of resilience.
In January 2025 he was named Chief Commercial Officer at Peytant Solutions, the small Phoenix-area medical device company developing AMStent — an absorbable metal stent platform — under CEO John Schorgl. The hire was announced widely in the medical device press. "JD has a history of recruiting, building, and driving high-performing cohesive, successful commercialization strategies and teams," Schorgl said in the announcement. "His experience partnering with the market to generate the key clinical, economic, and business value propositions required to drive the rapid adoption of new technologies will set us up for both short-term and long-term commercial success."
Where Is He Now
On March 9, 2026 — two months before this profile was written — Certus Critical Care, a Salt Lake City-based medical device company developing precision sensing platforms for life-critical applications, announced J.D. Simpson as Chief Executive Officer. He was returning to the company where he'd briefly served as CEO in 2019-2020, before the Insightec years and the Peytant CCO role. The company's flagship product is the Endovascular Variable Aortic Control (EVAC) System, a device designed to stabilize trauma patients suffering from hemorrhagic shock — an estimated 85,000 patients in the United States every year — by giving emergency physicians precision control over blood pressure and blood flow during the critical window between catastrophic blood loss and surgical intervention. The Department of Defense has issued multiple grants for the device's development. The U.S. military, the trauma surgery community, and a growing list of trauma centers are paying attention.
"Certus has reached a stage where precision matters — in strategy, execution, and capital deployment," Simpson said in the announcement. "The company has built a highly differentiated platform with strong clinical relevance. My focus is to translate that foundation into predictable execution, accelerate adoption, and build a durable, scalable business." His co-founder and board chair, Dr. Austin Johnson — the trauma surgeon and engineer who invented the EVAC platform — added the kind of internal endorsement that mirrors what Coach K had said about him a quarter-century earlier: "JD's proven ability to translate innovation into enterprise value makes him the ideal leader for this next phase. He has consistently demonstrated how to align teams, execute with discipline, and drive successful commercialization."
He's 46 years old now. He lives in Durham, still — never left, never wanted to. The 2001 ring is in a drawer or a display case somewhere. The 1999 St. Petersburg loss to UConn is far enough away to remember without wincing. He posts on his LinkedIn about resilience, about working out with his 85-year-old father on his birthday, about the way precision matters in medical devices the way it matters in everything else worth doing. There is a fan-page on DukeUpdate.com that exists exclusively to celebrate him — the tagline reads, with perfect deadpan affection: Hindering productivity since the 1998-1999 basketball season.
The walk-on who scored 41 career points at Duke is, in 2026, the CEO of a company whose first product is designed to keep people alive in the worst few minutes of their lives. The kid Coach K named a tri-captain in January 2001 because he had the respect of everybody even though he didn't play — that quality, it turns out, is the one that actually scales. Duke's winningest senior class ever produced an NBA Hall-of-Famer in Battier and a long career of championships and broadcasting from him, an NBA draft pick in Nate James (who became a longtime Coach K assistant and is now an NBA assistant), an investor in Ryan Caldbeck. And it produced J.D. Simpson, who runs a company that builds machines that save lives, who has spent twenty-five years quietly turning the muscles of leadership into the only thing that has ever really mattered. The basketball was the practice. This — what he's doing now — is the game.