You need experience to get experience.We broke the loop.

The system is closed at the front door. Every résumé screen for an entry-level internship asks for prior internship experience — preferably at a name-brand firm — that almost no freshman or sophomore can have yet. The qualification it filters for is the qualification it refuses to let you earn.

What replaces a real evaluation is a credential lottery: which high school you went to, which adults knew your parents, which on-campus club let you in. None of those measure how well you actually think through a financial model, dissect a competitor, or write a one-page memo a partner would forward without editing.

The alternative isn’t more applications. It’s a way to prove the work directly, get real feedback within minutes, and walk away with a record that doesn’t depend on anyone vouching for you. The work is the credential.

I applied to forty internships my freshman year. I made it past the résumé screen for two. Both interviewers were polite, but the conversations were the same: “this would be a stretch — most of our interns are juniors who already had a finance internship sophomore summer.” The qualification I needed was the qualification the application was supposed to be for.

Watching the people who did get in, I noticed most of them weren’t more capable than the people who didn’t — they were more visible. A parent at the firm. A target school with on-campus recruiting that front-loaded the funnel. They had been pre-sorted before anyone read a single word they’d written. The credential gate isn’t a quality filter. It’s a proxy for who was introduced to the right person early.

The fix has to be a way to prove the work directly — before anyone hands you a job to do it on. RuneShips is that. Real tasks from real companies. Written feedback in minutes, not weeks. A record that follows you across submissions and lands in front of recruiters, regardless of which dorm you live in.

— Diego Marjotie, founder

Posting a task on RuneShips is recruiting, not work outsourcing. You’re not collecting deliverables to ship — you’re getting a transparent read on how a candidate frames an ambiguous problem, what they reach for first, where their thinking breaks down. The point is the audit trail, not the artifact.

For an early-career talent funnel, this gets you signal earlier and from further out: candidates beyond the same five target schools, sophomores you’d otherwise never see until they’re already someone else’s hire, and an employer-brand surface that thousands of motivated students opt into voluntarily. Treat it like an open-book case interview that runs all semester, with the candidates who self-select for it.