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Contract roles can feel like the perfect job setup: flexible hours, work-from-home perks, and a way to break into your dream company. For some, they also serve as a temporary solution until a more permanent position comes along. Yet sometimes when freelancers decide to transition to a full-time gig, their contract history can potentially come back to bite themeven when it shouldnt. In a job interview, employers might ask: Can you work effectively on a team? Can you take direction from a manager? Will you think about your work long term? Or they might not ask at all, but theyll still wonder. To be clear: Freelancing or contract work is work, of course. But if full-time employment is your goal, knowing how to address these concerns does matter in a job interview. Dont assume First, in a job interviewno matter which side of the table youre sitting onits essential not to make assumptions. Its important for hiring managers to be aware of assumptions they might have. Instead of assuming, ask very direct questions, says Phoebe Gavin, a career and leadership coach. Dont just assume they cant work a 9-to-5, or that theyre not willing to commit to a company long term. If youre a job seeker, when applying for roles and in interviews, get ahead of assumptions by addressing them head-on. If the employer is looking for a collaborative team member, share examples of how youve worked effectively with others in the past. The hiring manager may genuinely not be aware of how collaborative freelance or contract work can be. So for the person who’s being interviewed, don’t make any assumptions about what they know about your work, Gavin says. Can you work on a team? Freelancers often work more independently, but that doesnt mean you prefer to, or that you work entirely alone. After all, you probably send your work off to someone for review. If you thrive in a team environmentor even miss being part of a teamsay so. When working as a freelancer, there may have been times when your work has required working with multiple parties and collaborating with teams. Even if it was temporary for a particular project, make it really clear that that’s something you have experience with, Gavin says. Highlight specific examples from past projects where you successfully collaborated with others, showing that you can contribute effectively on a team. Career coach Patrice Williams Lindo recommends saying something like: I rebrand quickly into the teams operating model. That means understanding how decisions get made, who owns what, and where my work fits into the broader system. I dont operate in silos. I network intentionally across stakeholders so my work lands cleanly, on time, and without creating friction. Independence, for me, means high trust, not high isolation. Can you take direction? When looking for a new job, remember that youll most likely have a manager. If youre thinking, I don’t really need a manager; I can do the work without you managing me, that mindset can create challenges with the person providing direction. Showing that you can take direction demonstrates adaptability and immediately makes you a stronger candidate. Williams Lindo suggests saying something like: I dont need micromanagement, but I do respect structure, accountability, and feedback. My goal is to deliver in a way that strengthens leadership credibility, not competes with it. Can you think beyond the project at hand? Freelancers usually focus on the work in front of them and dont always have to think about long-term impact, but in a full-time role, youre expected to see the bigger picture. If thats something you do already, make sure you say that. For example, if you like to promote your work after its published, thats something worth highlighting. Williams Lindo suggests saying, Even when my engagement is project-based, my mindset is enterprise-level. I document decisions, build repeatable processes, and leave behind claritynot just deliverables. Im always thinking about how my work ladders up to longer-term outcomes, because recognition comes from impact, not just execution. Contract roles can help you land a full-time position if you want one. By addressing assumptions up front and showing that you can collaborate, take direction, and think beyond individual projects, you signal that youre ready to thrive in a full-time role. Freelance experience is real work, and it matters. When presented strategically, it can showcase your impact and position you as a strong candidate for permanent opportunities.
Category:
E-Commerce
Whenever I tell people Im an auctioneer, there are inevitably two follow up questions: First: Do you talk really fast like those guys on TV? followed by a cartoonish imitation, complete with an imaginary microphone and a pseudo Southern accent. Second: Whats the most expensive thing youve ever sold? After two decades of auctioneering, the answer is usually something in the many millions. I typically just name the last item I sold for over a million dollars. Whether someone pictures a fast talking cattle auction or a refined British gentleman selling Picassos in black tie, auctioneers are assumed to do one thing: talk. A lot. Which is why most people are shocked to learn that the most powerful tool I like to use on stage isnt my voice at all. Its silence. When Im onstage in front of 500 people, yes, fast, energetic bidding can electrify a room. But in auctioneering, as in negotiation, the person who is comfortable with silence holds the advantage. Think about the last time you negotiated anything. The one who jumps to fill every uncomfortable silence often reveals the most. The one who sits in the quiet controls the pace. Lessons learned After years in the boardroom and on stage, here are the top three lessons Ive learned about how silence can capture the attention of any room: 1. When a room is talking, dont talk over it. Own the moment. If a crowd wont quiet down, talking louder rarely works. Instead, I smile and say, Ill wait until the room is quiet enough to hear me. The shift is immediate. People realize theyre missing something or they are being rude, and they stop. Once theyve realized Im willing to wait for them to stop talking before Ill start again the dynamic is shifted, and now they are paying attention. 2. Make your point, then stop talking. Many times when I am onstage with a new crowd I will ask the audience where I should start the bidding. Instead of throwing out a number that could intimidate half the room, I will say to the audience who wants to start the bidding? When the person raises their hand Ill ask where are we starting the bidding tonight? and then I simply wait . . . 9 out of 10 times the person will come in at a higher level simply because they dont know where I plan to start and want to be sure they dont announce a low bid. Youll be amazed how often the other side rushes to fill the space, usually revealing exactly what you need to know. 3. Silence raises more money than any speech ever could. During the paddle raise portion of a charity auction paddle raise, Im not offering a vacation home or a puppy. Im simply asking for donations. When I begin at the highest level, say, $25,000 the room gets very still. People shift in their chairs. They look at each other. They wait. But more importantly, I wait. And sometimes Ill throw in a joke to show them how at ease I am in the silence Ill wait just long enough until it starts to get really uncomfortable and then I smile and wait a little longer. Inevitably someone will raise their hand simply to break the tension. Its no concern for me; I will wait all night. Thats the power of silence: It moves people to act. The next time you are in an important meeting, giving a speech, or presenting on stage, remember the power of silence and use it to your advantage.
Category:
E-Commerce
Cloudflare has often been described as some version of the most important internet company youve never heard of. But for the better part of 2025, cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince has been trying to change that. The companys core business is to improve the performance and enhance the security of websites and online applications, protecting against malicious actors and routing web traffic through its data centers to optimize performance. Six billion people pass through our network every single month, Prince says. If Cloudflare is doing its job well, no one notices. But in July, Prince declared Content Independence Day, a broadside against the AI companies that, in his view, were unfairly scraping content to the detriment of the media industry. Cloudflare enabled clients that signed up for its pay per crawl service to block AI crawlers from accessing their content unless the companiesAnthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc.paid for the privilege. This was catnip to the media, Fast Company included, which immediately started paying a lot more attention to Cloudflare. I think this is the most interesting question over the next five years, Prince says. What is the future business model of the internet going to be? Prince has a personal interest in this question. He was the editor of his school newspaper at Trinity College (the Connecticut one, not Dublin) and, in 2023, he and his wife purchased the Park Record, his hometown newspaper in Park City, Utah. I appreciate the hard work of our journalistic team, whos showing up at city council meetings, covering local politics. There has to be a business model to support that work, he says. That work is critically important if were going to have a functioning society. This interview has been edited and condensed. Before Cloudflare, you cofounded Unspam Technologies, an email spam-checker service, and the open-source Project Honey Pot, which tracks and identifies spammers and malicious bots. Theres a common thread to your companies. Theyre all about preventing something bad from happening, from spam to cyberattacks to unauthorized data scraping. What would a psychiatrist say about this? I guess I have a superhero fetish or something. Youre a protector. A protector, yeah. I went to law school, and so a lot of the ideas start with: Where is there a failure in society? And if we solve that problem in some way, well be able to turn that into a business. And thats worked, really. It didnt work as well with the first spam company [Unspam], but at Cloudflare, its really driven everything that weve done. [Photo: Amber Hakim] What was your original mission for Cloudflare and how has it changed? Cloudflare started about 15 years ago, when [cofounder and COO] Michelle [Zatlyn] and I were business students. When people would ask us what our mission was, wed say, Our mission is to take advantage of this interesting market opportunity, make some money, and impress our parents. Which is, I think, if anyones being honest, kind of why almost everything starts. We knew that in order to build out the network to service large customers, we needed data and we needed ways to build the models to figure out who the good guys were, who the bad guys were, and [how] to stop them. We had the bright idea that we would offer a free version of the service. We thought startups and individual developers would be the ones who would sign up. Thats not what happened at first. What happened was that every civil society organization, every nonprofit, every humanitarian organization signed up because they had small budgets but big security problems. So one day we realized that everyone who was doing some sort of good around the internet was relying on us. I remember going to lunch with a bunch of our engineers, and one of them said, This is the first job where I feel like Im actually helping build a better internet. That resonated, and that phrase kept coming up. Finally someone said, Thats Cloudflares mission: to help build a better internet. And thats what stuck. Cloudflare experienced a significant outage in mid-November after a routine infrastructure update. You corrected that problem within a few hours, but how do you mitigate these risks moving forward? Does the rise of AI affect the risk of these kinds of incidents? Any outage is unacceptable given Cloudflares role in supporting a large portion of the Internet, and we take full responsibility. Were implementing additional safeguards to help prevent similar incidents in the future. Past outages have always led us to build new, more resilient systems. We’ll also remain transparent, as we’ve always been in these situations; we published a postmortem within about 12 hours to share what happened and what were learning. As the internet evolves, including the rise of AI, we continually assess new risks to ensure our systems remain resilient. Outages and bugs can happenthats the nature of softwarebut our customers trust is our top priority. Over the years, youve come under pressure to deny service to sites that are associated with hate speech and harassment, raising questions about Cloudflares role in content moderation. As you look ahead to the midterms and the 250th anniversary of America next year and then the national election in 2028, what concerns you most when it comes to misinformation and disinformation in the AI age? I think its funny that Im sort of known as the content moderation guy. Were 15 years old, and weve had basically three incidents [the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer and extremist forums 8chan and Kiwi Farms]. Essentially, 6 billion people pass through our network every single month. Thats the entire online population. Thats the scale that we have, and we have a responsibility to those people. So the question is, When you have that responsibility, what do you do? People have written about this for a long time. I actually went and dusted off a bunch of my philosophy books from college. Aristotle writes a lot about how governments build trust. Were not a government, but we operate at a scale that would be inconceivable to Aristotle, and at some level have the same challenges around that. Fundamentally, Aristotle argued that there are three things you need for trust: transparency, consistency, and accountability. Transparency: You need to know what the rules are. Consistency: The same rules should be applied the same way all the time. And ten accountability: The people who apply the rules should be responsible to the rules themselves. In answer to your question, thereve been a couple of big AI companies that have invited me to be on their boards. Ive always said no, but I engage with them; 80% of the big AI companies are Cloudflare customers, so we have a relationship with them. I think theyre doing the right thing, and theyre going a million miles an hour. And, I mean, its so exciting. But we have to stop and think about: How do you build trust? I think Im the largest nonacademic buyer of Aristotles Politics on Amazon. Ive sent signed copies to every AI executive Ive met, saying, I know you dont have a lot of time, but take the time to read this. Lets talk about how AI is eroding the traditional information ecosystem and what Cloudflare is trying to do about it. Twenty-seven years ago, a fateful thing happened: Google launched and did two things. One, it built a better search engine. Even more importantly, it built the first business model and monetization model for the internet. It helps generate traffic, and then it provides you the tools to make that traffic profitable. That has funded the growth of the vast majority of the internet. Weve gone through some platform shifts along the way. We went to social, but social was still driven by traffic. Whats going on right nowthat I think people dont completely understandis were going through another platform shift. Its a bigger platform shift than weve ever seen before, which is that the way youre going to consume information is through AI. With a search engine, you did a search, it returned 10 blue links, and then the search wasnt over. Google was a treasure map, which generated traffic to Fast Company or whoever; behind that treasure map, you could monetize it. But we know thats not the end state because sci-fi tells us its not, and sci-fi often predicts the future pretty well. If you think about any movie that has a helpful robot in it, if you say, I would like a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, the robot doesnt come back and say, Here are 10 links, go follow em and maybe youll find a nice recipe. It says, Heres the recipe. And thats exactly what ChatGPT, Anthropic, and increasingly Google with AI Overviews are doing. And make no mistake: For 95% of users, 95% of the time, thats a better user interface. That user interface is going to win and is going to be the new platform by which we consume information. Which is quite a problem for any entitynot just the mediathat wants to be found on the internet. Right. Instead of going and generating traffic, following a treasure map, and getting to Fast Company, now youre reading a derivative thats been summarized and maybe combined with other sources, taking the Fast Company information and putting it in this new ChatGPT interface. And thats a problem because the entire internet has been built on traffic, and that traffic is going away. So no matter what, as the interface of the internet changes, the business model of the internet is going to change. You have a solution for this: the pay-per-crawl model. This business proposition theoretically enables those content providers to continue to provide that content, and be compensated for it, in a way that wont compromise this new andI agreebetter user experience. How would this work? Im optimistic because both sides need each other. There are really three things you need to be an AI company, two of which are very expensive and one of which has largely been free. The two things that are expensive are going to get cheaper and cheaper, and the thing that has been free is going to be what differentiates AI companies, which theyre going to be willing to pay more for. So, what are the three things? The first is chips, GPUs, but its silicon, right? Theres never been a time in history where a silicon shortage doesnt turn into a silicon glut. Theres a bunch of sand in the world. GPUs will increasingly become commodities, the same way that CPUs and all other silicon have. The second is talent. Five years ago, if you were getting a PhD in AI, you were kind of a laughingstock. It was thought of as this dead industry that was hot in the 70s and 80s, and then it became the place where the sort of weird computer science professor went and promised that tomorrow AI was coming. Well, it turns out they were right. They just had the time frame wrong. But now its gone from this backwater to every university spinning up a department. I dont think there will be a glut of AI researchers, but I think the days of billion-dollar salaries at Metathat wont last forever because the education markets are efficient. The last bit is content. In almost all these cases, unique content ends up being the thing that differentiates media over time. YouTube, for example, started out as a technology play. It could deliver streaming video cheaper, faster than everybody else, and thats why it won. As the rest of the industry caught up with the technology, YouTube had to differentiate. First it was discoverability with search, now its with unique content that you can only get on YouTube. I think the AI companies are going to be very, very similar, which means theyre going to need that information that only you [media companies] have. So the keyif youre a media company todayis to stop the free buffet: Only you have the review of the hot restaurant in Tuscaloosa, which is unique content thats going to be incredibly precious and incredibly essential. So step one is to say: Were not going to give every AI company our content for free. Were going to say, Youre blocked. Thats what we at Cloudflare have been helping with. And then how the market develops after that, we have some ideas, but Im not quite sure. What Im confident inand what the data so far bears outis that the more unique, the more quirky, the more local your content is, the more valuable it is to AI companies, and the more likely it is that theres going to be a healthy and sustainable marketplace that exists for you to be able to sell that content. I think that this can be pie-expanding and that we might be on the doorstep of a golden age of media. I love the optimism, and I want to believe it, for obvious reasons. To put a fine point on the mechanics of it, the publisher signs up; Cloudflare blocks the AI crawlers from accessing their content; the publisher sets the price for the AI company to access that content and get paid; and you guys get a cut. Thats pretty much how that works? We have a bunch of different theories of how this could work [over time]. It could be micropayments. Thats what youve described, where the publisher sets a price, and then whenever an agent or a crawler or scraperthose are all synonymstries to access that content, they pay a fraction of a penny or a few pennies. It could be something thats closer to a Spotify model, where maybe all the AI companies contribute to a pool and that pool gets aggregated and then [distributed]. In Spotifys case, its based on how many minutes get listened to. Exactly what the business model looks like, its going to take some time to mature. If you think about music, we ended up with Spotify, but in order to get to Spotify, we started with Napster, which was sort of anything goes, and then Steve Jobs steps onstage and launches iTunes, 99 cents a song, which was revolutionary at the time, but that wasnt the business model that eventually won. The business model that eventually won was something closer to all you can eat for $10 a month. My hunch is that were not going to get the business model right the first time around, and it may not be Cloudlare that figures it out. There are lots of people who are thinking about this problem. But no matter what, we have to start with scarcity. Weve got to close the spigot. And again, this isnt just about media. The same challenges are coming for e-commerce companies, travel companiesanyone who sells anything online. Ive been struck by how many of the people who are calling us are saying, Hey, this is a real problem for us too. Big financial institutions where theyre like, No, no, no, the AI companies are disintermediating us as well, and theyre creating a problem where our research teams arent getting compensated as much. I mean, whats the future for a Booking.com in an AI-powered world? Whats the future for anyone who in the past aggregated a bunch of supply together? What is a brand? What is it worth if its just agents that are interacting and you dont have humans that are there? What I think people dont fully appreciate is that this is a more radical transformation than it was to go to mobile. Fundamentally, were going to have to reinvent how we interact and thats going to impact everyone. Lets close by going beyond the information ecosystem. Something I struggle with is how seriously to take the existential threat of AInot to revenue models, but humanity itself. Very smart people argue very different ends of the spectrum, from the terrifying vision of Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose book on the dangers of a superhuman AI is called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, to the much more sanguine outlook of folks like Yann LeCun, Metas chief AI scientist. Where do you fall on this spectrum? Im on the more optimistic side. More on Yanns side. But I will say that I feel like this is a distraction from the real problems [were facing now]. Is there going to be a Terminator moment? Weve got a lot of stuff to figure out before that. Sure, we can have cocktail party conversations about whether this is going to end the world or lead to kind of a utopia. But dont let that conversation distract from the more important, more immediate conversation, which is whos going to pay journalists going forward? [Laughs] I agree: Nothing could be more important than that.
Category:
E-Commerce
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