This year marks the 25th anniversary of Byron Deeter's National Collegiate Championship team when he was a senior, and amid the uncertainty of how that occasion might be marked, the 1996 alum has never been more certain of the successful future awaiting Cal rugby and the Golden Bears who become graduates of the University of California.

"You learn adaptability and resilience in the Cal rugby program," said Deeter, a member of four national title teams as a Rugby Bear and cloud computing expert widely recognized as a top global investor across all industry sectors. "I'm confident in the current student-athletes. They are going to go out into this world and have immense positive impact. The world has thrown events at us, from the health crisis to the economic crisis to the social crisis, but one of the things these Cal rugby players learn, as Jack Clark often says, is to be grateful for everything and entitled to nothing."

Deeter has a good perch for his optimistic perspective. As a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, he "has had no less than seven cloud companies go public in the past five years," according to Forbes Magazine, which in December ranked Deeter, as it perennially has, on its Midas List of The World's Best Venture Capital Investors.

Deeter had notable success on the gridiron at El Camino High School with two years of experience on the Sacramento Eagles Youth Rugby Club. "The decision I had to make for college was to go play football for a smaller school back East, or join a world-class rugby program," he said. In the fall of 1992, on his first day as a newly arrived freshman on campus, Byron met Alli, who became his girlfriend, also graduated with a degree in Political Economy and today, 24 years into their marriage, is mother to their three children, Baily, Skylar and Logan.

That spring, undersized and starting from the bottom of Coach Clark's depth chart, Deeter plugged into the learning process at tighthead prop, one of the most difficult and, as such, highest-paid positions on the professional rugby pitch.
  During Deeter's freshman season of 1993, the varsity starter in the No. 3 jersey was future Oxford Blue and U.S. National Team player Ray Lehner, an All-American whose starting role was taken over by fellow All-American Brian Frantz, the starting tighthead in '94 and '95 who recently created an endowment for Cal rugby in the position's name. Deeter made it his mission to learn from these and other great teammates.

"There's an immense history of mentorship through the program, and one of the benefits of having filled the boots of many of those legends, All-Americans, national team players and the like, is that you get a chance to learn from the very best," Deeter said. "Early on, I was just honored to be on the second or third teams, and be around those men, see them in action and just soak up the experiences and learnings, much like I did in the business world learning from other great mentors around me."

Deeter saw his first varsity action as a freshman reserve against UC Davis. He began his debut by going to the wrong spot to mess up a lineout, then came out his first scrum with his nose bleeding.

"The game is going on at a million miles an hour, I run to the sideline and look at Coach Clark," Deeter recalled. "'Coach, where's my sub?'" he asked Clark.

"Coach says, 'Deeter, you are the sub.'"

  After the Bears won the '93 national championship, defeating Harvard in the semifinals and Air Force in the final held in Houston, Deeter began an internship in Sacramento at the State Capitol. Putting his time-management skills to the test, he continued working 20 hours a week during the ensuing school year with a full class load and all the responsibilities of the team.

That following spring, the Rugby Bears traveled to Washington, D.C. for the final four, defeating Penn State in the semifinal and ending with Cal's 27-13 victory over Navy for the 1994 national title.

"I didn't play a minute in that game and yet the team pulled me in at the end," remembered Deeter of the postgame celebration on the field. "The bonding that happened there, the camaraderie, I absolutely take with me to this day. They are some of my happiest lifetime memories, not just in sport."

Deeter's hard work brought the team another unforgettable experience the next day, when the team was received at the U.S. Capitol by the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had coordinated with Gov. Pete Wilson to schedule the tour for Deeter and his teammates, dressed for the occasion in team blazers and ties.

 

"It was a VIP Capitol tour experience, hosting us into the chambers," Deeter said. "This felt like we were getting recognized on a national level." When the team returned to the Bay Area, Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien and Governor Pete Wilson invited the Bears to a reception and photo opportunity at a UC Regents meeting in San Francisco. The governor's Chief of Staff, Bob White, remains one of Deeter's close mentors.

Deeter interned again that summer for the Governor in Sacramento and maintained his work commitments as a student-athletes during '94-95, which was highlighted by the completion and opening of the newly constructed Witter Rugby Field. The Bears hosted the 1995 National Collegiate Championships at their new pitch in Strawberry Canyon, beating Penn State again in the semi before besting Air Force, 48-16, for the national title.

Deeter spent the summer before his senior year interning for the U.S. Ambassador in Paris. Upon returning to Berkeley, he continued volunteering while a full-time student-athlete, assisting on Pete Wilson's and then Bob Dole's Presidential campaigns.

Amid all his commitments, the 1996 campaign that mattered most to Deeter was that of the Rugby Bears, which, if successful, would take them to the championships hosted in Colorado Springs. "My senior year, we knew going into that April Drive that it was going to take absolutely everything we had," he said. That spring, the Blue and Gold rebounded from a regular-season loss to Stanford, then advanced through the national postseason and into the final by beating Navy, while the Cardinal was upset by Penn State in their semifinal matchup.
 

Cal took on the Nittany Lions in the championship and came away with a 47-6 result for the 1996 title. "I still remember set plays and the emotion in that game. Every little play mattered, and what a relief it was when the very last second ticked off the clock and we had made our brothers proud. Just an awesome part of this amazing Cal history," Deeter said. "Honestly, coming in freshman year, I never expected to crack the starting lineup. I aspired to, but just seeing the talent level and ability of those who came before me, I viewed that as my aspirational goal. To make that group senior year and be able to win the championship as a starter on the field is certainly my most proud athletic achievement across all sports and competitions I've ever been part of."

Clark, a U.S. Rugby and Cal Athletic Hall of Famer who has coached all of the Bears' 136 all-time rugby All-Americans and led the program to 33 of its 37 all-time national championships, holds Deeter in very high esteem.

"As an athlete, Byron was a great teammate from day one," Clark said. "Very good locker room guy, kind of always thinking about the team as a whole. He had an extraordinary perspective even as a young man himself. The fact he made himself into a top-level tighthead prop is pretty remarkable. By spring of 1996, he had locked down the starting job and was a significant leader to a group of young forwards that needed his direction. For sure, I do not believe we would have won that championship without him."

Deeter graduated that spring with his degree in Political Economy and another very ambitious goal. In 1999, three years after being hired by McKinsey as a consultant, he left his first post-graduate job to become the founding President and CEO of Trigo Technologies, a startup in business software integration and information management whose success was among the most noteworthy of its era. After raising venture capital for Trigo's Series A funding with Bessemer Venture Partners in 2000, Deeter ushered Trigo to become one of the first global SaaS companies, reaching profitability and selling to IBM in 2004. The following year he returned to Bessemer as a partner and has since led BVP's global cloud practice.

"I absolutely aspired to be the founder of something. It was one of my career goals," Deeter said. "I was extremely focused on it but also intimidated by the challenge. The resiliency characteristics you learn from Cal rugby help you fight through and figure it out while you're in the middle of it, and that's really what I did. Professionally, it's the hardest thing I've undertaken. I'm very proud of the fact that we made a long list of successful people out of Trigo."
 

More recently, Deeter has collaborated with another generation of Cal rugby players to help create a multibillion-dollar company in ServiceTitan, whose Chief Revenue Officer is Ross Biestman '07. The All-American and national champion has brought aboard additional Cal rugby alumni to help propel the company forward, including Garrett Cross, a 2007 graduate, national champion and United States Marine Corps Officer; Rikus Pretorius, All-American, captain of the 2008 national champions and USA 7s player; Keegan Engelbrecht, a captain, All-American and national champion who graduated in 2011; and, for a while, Colin Hawley, the fellow 2011 graduate, national champion, All-American and veteran U.S. National Team player.

"What's exciting to me now, as a veteran investor, is supporting new alumni that are following that path," Deeter said. "When I look at someone like Ross Biestman, I see in him the immense potential and drive to go out and be a leader. That's the gestalt of the program, amazingly talented people who are successful at most of the things they undertake. Ross and his team are doing amazing work and leading the next wave of great executive talent in technology."

"Byron Deeter has been a mentor to me," Biestman said. "His successful track record goes beyond great investments, to helping business executives achieve more than they may have ever imagined possible."

Deeter's wisdom has also been invaluable in his role as member of the California Rugby Advisory Board, which stewards the current and future well-being of the oldest Intercollegiate sport at Cal.

"Byron has been a tremendous resource to our board," CRAB Chairman Irving "Bud" Lyons said. "He has always been accessible and more than willing to participate and engage. His perspective and insights add huge value and are greatly appreciated."
 

When Deeter funded a Positional Endowment for Cal rugby in 2018, he generously chose to do so not in his own name, but in the name of Robert Paylor. "Robert is a reminder of what it means to be a competitor," Deeter said. "I love the example he is setting. I want more people to hear his story, and I think they will."

Deeter is also more optimistic than ever about Cal's leadership in Intercollegiate Athletics and across campus.

"The collaboration among Coach Clark, (Athletic) Director (Jim) Knowlton and Chancellor (Carol) Christ is the best relationship I've seen in the history of my association with Cal," he said. "I really respect and appreciate the approach that the Director and Chancellor are taking with regard to Athletics and with rugby overall, and I'm extremely optimistic that we're going to continue to get stronger together. The athletics programs across Cal, despite the short-term effects of COVID, are going to be in a better place in the years ahead. I'm just really inspired by their leadership."

Deeter remains confident that today's rugby student-athletes will help solve the problems of today and tomorrow: "Companies will be lucky to be able to hire them and their employees will be lucky to be able to work with them. They bring an element of high-performance, discipline and achievement that organizations are really looking for, these days especially."

As the 1996 team prepares to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of its national championship, Cal rugby alumni of every generation thank Byron Deeter for his love of the University and commitment to its continued excellence.