Alumni Spotlight - Todd Basche, E'78

It seems like such a simple concept, and it certainly isn’t a new idea. But Northeastern graduate Todd Basche is the person who put a product on the market that is beginning to turn the combination lock business on its head.

In 2002, Basche, E’78, with his wife, Rahn, founded Wordlock, Inc., a Santa Clara, CA-based company that uses letters instead of numbers to set the lock combination. Words or phrases are easier to remember than a random numeric code, Basche said, and the combination can be reset repeatedly.

“If you go through the patents you’ll find that attempts to develop combination locks using words instead of numbers dates back to the late 1800s,” said Basche, who had been vice president of software applications for Apple and the general manager and vice president of research and development with Remedy Corporation before forming Wordlock. “It’s not a new phenomenon.”

Early versions of the locks had all 26 letters of the alphabet on each of 26 individual wheels to reflect all possible word combinations. The prototypes, however, were quite cumbersome and prevented any hopes of a compact design.

Basche utilized sophisticated software and algorithms, while studying word patterns and linguistics, to develop a limited set of letters to spell out the maximum number of words. The result is a travel/luggage lock with 10,000 letter combinations and a lock for school lockers that has 100,000 combination possibilities. Wordlock also produces bike locks and cable locks.

Wordlock has moved more than 1.5 million units through 12,000 retailers since the company’s formation, and the product has been featured in a number of national publications and television programs.

“We started from scratch in January 2002 in our house with a blank sheet of paper,” said Basche, whose company has eight employees. “It’s been very rewarding and challenging.

“Most people have the same reaction, and it’s twofold: One, why didn’t I think of that? And, two, it’s really so much easier to remember words than numbers. Those are the two things we most often here when people see our products.

“There are a lot of locks sold in the world; it’s a billion-dollar market. And it’s a pre-existing market, so you don’t have to wait for the product to gain a foothold.”

Basche has more than 20 years of experience in engineering, research and development, and product placement, with his introduction to technology coming with his first Northeastern co-op job at the former Prime Computer in Chelmsford, MA. After several years of product development at Prime, Basche was among the first hires at Apollo Computer, one of the first vendors of graphical workstations – along with Sun Microsystems and Symbolics – in the 1980s.

“The co-op program put me in the position of getting invaluable experience, but it also helped me make the decision that, yeah, this is what I want to do with my life,” Basche said. “By the time I left Northeastern, there was no doubt that I had made the right career choice, and being able to discover that through co-op made the transition that much easier.”

The co-op program was so instrumental to Basche’s experiential learning experience that he is doing his part to expand the program to the fertile learning environment of Silicon Valley.

“I think it would be great to have students have the same opportunities I had to discover themselves,” said Basche, who has two brothers and a cousin who also graduated from Northeastern. “And it certainly would go a long way toward expanding the good reputation of Northeastern.”