The two founders who built SAPI are former Math Olympiads. Ana King mentions this the way you would mention the weather, because at SAPI it explains almost everything about how hiring works.

“Our CEO and our CCO are former Math Olympiads, the standards are through the roof,” she says. When she arrived as Chief People Officer three years ago, the brief they gave her was not a headcount plan. It was a bar. “They’ve kind of asked me to bring in people that would be hired into Google,” she says. She knew exactly what that meant, because she used to work there.

What she did not have was money. Her entire annual budget for recruiting, for building the team, and for building the culture was twenty thousand pounds. Not per hire. Per year.

Against that she has hired roughly fifty people, over about two and a half years, without spending anything on agencies.

What twenty thousand pounds actually buys

The number invites disbelief, so it is worth spending it in public. The budget covers an applicant tracking system, an HRIS, an interview note taker, and Flexa, SAPI’s employer branding partner. That is the whole line item. There is no agency retainer inside it, no job board spend of consequence, no contingency fee waiting at the end of a search.

The reason it works is that King did not treat the constraint as a procurement problem. She treated it as a design problem, and she built in a deliberate order.

“The first thing we built was a recruitment engine and a solid EVP,” she says. The employee value proposition came underpinned by a retention philosophy and, behind that, the unglamorous infrastructure: policies, and the practical question of how people at SAPI actually work together. Build the reason people stay before you build the machine that brings them in, and the machine costs less to run.

She is direct about the logic. Budget was scarce, but hiring intelligently, with talent density as the objective, was itself the long-term commercial play. The saving was never the point. The quality of the roster was the point, and the saving followed from getting the roster right.

The argument she had to win first

None of it was available to her on arrival. The founders wanted people in the office.

“They were very suspicious initially,” she says. “I was telling them, hey, let me do this. Let me build the remote culture.” Their answer was no. Her answer was to ask for room.

“No, no, no, let me roll with this. I’ll build you an amazing team, but you’ve got to give me this freedom.”

She got the freedom, and the benefits she chose with it are the reason the budget stretches. Six weeks a year of working from anywhere. One day a week in the office and the rest wherever people want. Access to a meditation app and to a learning platform carrying a hundred thousand courses, both of which cost SAPI very little and are worth a great deal to the person using them.

That is the trade she keeps making. Not the cheapest benefit, but the one with the widest gap between what it costs the company and what it is worth to the individual. A remote policy is free. To a senior engineer weighing two offers, it is not free at all.

Vietnam, before there was a brand to recruit against

The hardest version of the problem was the second team.

SAPI now runs a team in the UK and a team in Vietnam. King opened the second one remotely, into a market where SAPI had no name, no local reputation, and nothing a candidate could look up. “It’s tough to hire remotely in a space where you have to build credibility, you have to build brand,” she says.

The team she built there is the part of the story she is least restrained about. The talent, she says, is fantastic, and the team is one they are genuinely proud of. It is also where the company now concentrates its hiring as it works to keep spending tight.

The hire that proves the method

Ask her which search best represents working without agencies and she does not reach for a volume story. She reaches for a single difficult one: SAPI’s finance leader.

He was not looking. That is the first thing she says about him, and it is the whole problem in one line, because a candidate who is not looking is the exact candidate an agency cannot cheaply deliver and an employer brand has to earn. The search was also technically narrow. Payment-linked financing is an unusual business model, and it demands a finance leader who can hold it.

She got him. In a zero-agency operation, that is not a recruiting win so much as a proof that the thing she built in year one, the engine and the EVP behind it, actually carries weight with people who have options.

Commercial first

King’s framing of her own job is sharper than the one the profession usually offers, and she states it without hedging.

“I am a Commercial leader first and a People leader second. People Operations, much like any other part of the business, needs to drive success for the company as a whole.”

That sentence explains the budget, the benefits, and the Vietnam decision. It also explains why she is unbothered by a tension her peers talk about constantly, the one between preserving a founder-led culture and adding enough structure that senior operators trust the place.

“It’s not really a tension we struggle with, to be perfectly frank,” she says. “There are no egos in the exec team at SAPI, just a group of leaders working hard to make the business a success.”

The number she watches most closely is engagement, and it has held at 4.3 out of 5 continuously for the past twelve months. She is careful about what that figure does and does not mean, because the conditions behind it are not gentle. It is high, she says, considering that SAPI is a scrappy startup and that working there is genuinely tough, because everyone works their socks off.

A 4.3 in a comfortable company is a pleasant result. A 4.3 in a company where the pace is punishing is a different measurement entirely. It says people are choosing to stay inside difficulty, which is the only version of retention that matters to a business still proving itself.

Three years, and the part she will not take credit for

The condition she inherited was not stable. SAPI was pre-revenue. The founders had run for two years without an HR function, and the company was losing people badly enough that the business itself was exposed. Two years without revenue and continuous churn is not a culture problem. It is an existential one.

What followed was stability first, then a roster, then a company that is now close to profitability.

King will happily discuss the mechanics of how that happened. She is markedly less willing to narrate it as a rescue, and she pushes back on any framing that casts the founders as the problem she solved.

“I am keen to commend my two founders,” she says. “I am very lucky to partner with them, they are excellent people and they have professionally grown in the last few years just as I have myself grown.”

The coaching work is real and she does not pretend otherwise. Three years ago the two founders were thirty, technically exceptional, with one prior employer between them and no experience managing people. Coaching them, and the wider leadership team, is part of her role and a challenge she says she gladly continues to take on. But she describes the turn as something that happened between people rather than to them. It arrived, in her telling, the moment the leadership team built trust with each other and could work with only the healthy evolution of the business at heart.

The company is now embarking on its Series A funding drive, which she calls a hugely exciting time. The hiring philosophy is not going to change to meet it. SAPI does not intend to grow aggressively. Talent density remains the goal.

Which brings the story back to where it started, at the bar the founders set and the budget they did not give her. King solved it by refusing the premise that a people function is a cost to be minimised, and treating it instead as the thing that determines whether a company gets to have a future at all. Fifty hires and twenty thousand pounds a year is a striking pair of numbers. What sits underneath them is a simpler claim, and one she has now spent three years proving.

People operations, done properly, is a commercial function. Everything else is bookkeeping.