Hudson Hill Capital's Executive-in-Residence (EIR) program pairs seasoned operating leaders with our portfolio companies to accelerate growth and sharpen execution. In this installment of our EIR Q&A series, we sat down with Isabela Costa, Chief Operating Officer at BlueCloud, a data and AI services firm built around the Snowflake ecosystem with roughly 500 people working remotely across North America, Latin America, India, and Eastern Europe, to talk about the challenges she tackled, what surprised her along the way and the lessons other operators can take from the experience.
Tell us about your background and what led you to join Hudson Hill Capital's Executive-in-Residence program.
I first learned about Hudson Hill in Spring 2024 while completing my MBA at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Their approach differed slightly from other firms, which typically recruit large classes in the Fall. The opportunity brought together many of the skills and experiences I had to date: financial services, business building and technology. Before Wharton, I spent six years at J.P. Morgan, then joined an Alpine Investors portfolio company. There, I worked on a small team that focused on M&A and collaborated closely with the firm’s co-founders. That's where I first saw what it looks like to put an operator inside a portfolio company early in its trajectory.
I come from a family of entrepreneurs, with my grandparents, father and brother all founding and building their own businesses. At Wharton, I started down a path that would have seen me follow in their footsteps when I launched a company with Joanna Coles, former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. We took the project from ideation through fundraising, securing investment commitments before Joanna was offered an ownership role at The Daily Beast. This move made sense for her career, but it wasn't in a sector that aligned with my focus on technology.
Which portfolio company did you partner with, and what was the situation when you stepped in?
I joined BlueCloud in April 2024 as Chief of Staff, about two and a half years after Hudson Hill invested. The company’s focus on Snowflake and AI was a primary driver in my decision to join, and from day one I dove in at the deep end, getting thrust into my first board meeting almost immediately.
When I joined, BlueCloud was early in its evolution, having been created in 2020 through the combination of two founder-owned IT services companies. In 2022, the company began focusing on Snowflake, which quickly became one of its core services partners. The company was founder-led and growing fast. This brought both real advantages and challenges. While there was great energy and excitement, some key functions (e.g., human resources and marketing) hadn’t grown and professionalized alongside the rest of the business.
What was the central challenge or opportunity you focused on first, and why did it rise to the top?
The first real challenge wasn't an analytical one. It wasn't pricing or strategy or any of the work I'd been trained to do. It was earning trust.
You can build the best plan imaginable, but it will die on contact if you don’t have the trust of the people who must carry it out. I came from a background that looked nothing like the average background at BlueCloud. After spending time in finance and private equity and earning my MBA, I suddenly found myself in a business where most people came up through delivery and engineering. My different background and my role coming in through Hudson Hill made it tempting for people to see me as an outsider. So, my first year was mostly about proving to the company’s leadership and my colleagues that I could be depended on. I did this by consistently showing up, being useful in tangible ways and becoming someone that the CEO could talk to candidly. Everything I’ve accomplished since has stemmed from that initial work to earn that trust, and it required more emotional intelligence than anything else I've done here.
You joined BlueCloud as Chief of Staff and now serve as COO. How did that transition come about?
The Chief of Staff title gives you a seat close to the CEO, a view across every function, and a mandate to work on whatever matters most that quarter. In my first year, that meant preparing for board meetings, restructuring the delivery organization and doing the slower work of earning the team’s trust. My promotion to COO in December 2025 formalized a role I had grown into over the prior 18 months. By then I was already running delivery operations and the Snowflake relationship, so the title caught up with the work rather than the other way around.
Moving from Chief of Staff into an operating role where you are responsible for a P&L is a core part of Hudson Hill’s EIR program. Rather than placing an executive into a fixed role and hoping it fits, the program starts you in a seat where you can learn the company from the inside, build credibility with the founder and team and take on more responsibility when you show you can carry it. For anyone considering this path, the Chief of Staff period is where you put in the hard yards that make the operating role possible.
Walk us through one or two specific initiatives you're most proud of. What did you do, and how did it play out?
Two, if I'm allowed!
The first was restructuring the delivery organization. I spent a stretch between November and January in Eastern Europe with a colleague, working closely to create the right title and compensation structure to meet the company’s objectives. Once we established the appropriate structure for the team, we connected delivery back to pricing with a focus on driving better gross margin optimization.
The second is Snowflake. That partnership is the foundation of BlueCloud’s go-to-market motion, and beginning in late 2025, I spent several months helping lead and strengthen the relationship. During that time, we focused the team on developing industry case studies that could be replicated across the Snowflake ecosystem, underpinned by our certifications in specific Snowflake applications. The team became rapid adopters of Snowflake’s AI code generation tool, CoCo, leading the Snowflake ecosystem in total consumption. As a result of the team’s hard work, Snowflake awarded BlueCloud the CoCo Catalyst Partner of the Year award.
What surprised you most about operating inside a private equity-backed company compared to your prior roles?
How much of the job is holding two views at once.
While my day-to-day is BlueCloud, I also think like an investor, which is where my background pushes me. Six years at J.P. Morgan and finance at Wharton mean I'm always looking ahead. The surprise was how much work sits between those two things. Building company culture has to work in the present while also balancing the goals of an exit. Those don't line up on their own. Getting them to line up means working backward from where you want to end up, then figuring out the implications for daily team priorities.
The other thing I underestimated is that in IT services, your people are your revenue. If people leave, revenue declines. It's that direct. So, every structural decision is also a retention decision, whether or not you framed it that way.
Looking back, what's the biggest lesson you'd pass on to another operating executive stepping into a similar situation?
Companies need different things at different stages, and so do the people running them. I think of a company as a living thing. It has a culture, opinions, wins, losses. It's made of people, so of course it behaves like one. And like a person, what a company needs after two decades of progress is different from what it needs in its first year of operation. So, read the stage you're in before applying the playbook.
What have you learned during your tenure in the EIR program that will be most valuable for the next stage of your career?
Grit, mostly! Some stretches over the past two years were challenging, and what carried me through was keeping the end goal in mind and knowing I had a specific job to do. Luckily, I came in knowing what an exit looks like and that growing founder-led businesses, especially complex international ones, can be complicated and even frustrating at times.
How has the partnership with your CEO shaped how you approach the work?
We talk every day, usually by phone, often several times. That only works because there's trust, and that trust came from putting in the hard yards together.
It also helps that our styles are similar. He is direct, tells you what he thinks, and manages as an enabler, which changes what I bring him. When something isn't working, I don't show up with a problem. I look at the options, run the math, build the model, and walk him through the scenarios and the costs. Then I tell him what my gut says, we talk it through for a few minutes, and we decide.
What advice would you provide to a future candidate considering a career in PE operations?
Be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses. I think almost anything is learnable, but some people are wired for this, and some aren't, and that's fine. Some people may find operating in smaller companies challenging, while others will find that appealing. It’s important to understand the rigors of operating inside fast-growth companies before you embark on the journey.
The other thing I'd say is there is no instruction manual on how to build companies. Business school gives you the tools and teaches you how to think, and that's worth a lot. But this isn't a case study where A leads to B leads to C. A company is a living thing, and things come up that nothing can prepare you for. A big part of the job is working it out as you go.