Our background
Siddharth Ashok was born in a family who adopted Buddhism in a small but wonderfully friendly village in Varanasi, India, where he got to experience a culture of smiles, warmth, and spirituality. At an early age, he got his first computer, which made him realize the immense power this little machine opened up to the curly haired boy. When not playing games with the other kids, he spent his time learning to become a programmer, it was his dream. Siddharth left his village at an early age to pursue his dreams and has since lived in Lucknow, Mumbai, and Goa, working for various tech companies. He is an Open source enthusiast and contributes to several open source projects such as WordPress. He likes making friends and you are most likely to stumble upon him in the next tech conference. While working in Goa together with a Swedish company, he met Hampus and they have been friends ever since.
Hampus Olsson grew up on the other side of the world, in a small village in the south of Sweden. He was a small, blue-eyed boy with straight blond hair. He was born a creative and liked to build and make everything from small huts in his garden, to PC games on his computer. Growing up with a mom who was a Webmaster in the early 90s, he also made his own websites about his pets and movies he liked. He made his first games and websites at the age of 8. That was the time he also started his imaginary company called Girg. He loved to write music, build websites, games and make art. At the age of 20, he moved to New York City where he did his internship with Your Majesty on Broadway. He has since worked with several international clients worldwide like Spotify, OnePlus and GANT. He has a strong passion for traveling and has lived a nomadic life, traveling to over 17 countries.
Siddharth and Hampus worked together for five years in Goa, India. At the end of their fifth year, they felt something was missing. That’s when they decided to start GrandWorks.
What we plan to do
With GrandWorks, we want to build a platform for our various ideas and projects to thrive upon. We want to build the best possible experience and optimize our lives in a way where we can stay creative and happy while doing great work.
We want to challenge the way people normally do business. We don’t want to be stuck in a loop, working from nine to five where only a portion of the hours is actually productive. We want to experiment and come up with the optimal working experience so that we can learn new things quicker, and come up with something that motivates and inspire others.
Our Journey
We recently started our journey out of a great Co-Working space called 91 Springboard in Goa, from here we run our Grand Base. It’s a great place to meet other creatives and entrepreneurs, and a great place to learn new things from the various events and talks happening in the space.
We’re currently busy working with clients such as OnePlus, Spotify and Dalberg. When we’re not doing client work, we discuss our long list of ideas we want to make a reality.
We’re also building an app called Abstruct, natively for iOS and Android. Sign up for the newsletter to stay tuned.
Learning by Doing
95% of the things we have learned so far was made from experimenting and by simply trying something new. We know by now that if you want to improve your skills, it’s important that you don’t think too much about the process. That you actually just throw yourself out there and take the first step into unknown territory. If that is learning a new code language, or figuring out how to render your first 3D scene, you have to start by taking the first step, not by waiting for someone to teach you or tell you how to do it.
When we grew up, there was no one there telling us what to do. It was out of curiosity and craving the knowledge that led us to learn the skills we know today. Don’t wait to get into a good school, there is nothing better than feeling the urge and need to learn by yourself.
Being Nomadic
Living a sustainable nomadic life can be something you only fantasize about. Let me tell you, it’s entirely possible. At GrandWorks, we want to work with the opportunity to live a more nomadic life, without sacrificing work and productivity, but instead, improving it.
Solving Real-world Problems
We want to build products that help people do a better job, more effectively. We also want to reach into challenging industries, needing improvement.
Thanks for taking your time to read our story! Be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter to stay up to date of what we’re doing. We’ll keep updating this journal with new, interesting topics. Stay tuned!