How should I describe my employment in a startup that failed on my resume, to a recruiter or at an interview

Question

In a nutshell I describe my last position as a "start-up that stopped", slightly flippant I know but if's difficult one to describe.

A number of recruiters, when fishing for leads are intent on finding out about the "business" as they've "never heard of it".

In essence, I guess, I'm asking for a script that best describes a business that didn't really have a viable product and never got serious funding and frankly was a disaster -negative phrases I do not want to use. My role in it was looking after the software development, not the business capitalisation side of things or whether it was a "viable product".

Answer 1

Well its pretty clear cut what to say,

Talk about the technical things that you did, challenges that you solved, etc. and simply state that the venture capital ran dry prior to the startup reaching break even point / Self Sustenance.

Happens every day, no skin off your back that you were employed to do what you did (and you did it) or alternatively you were conned into accepting shares instead of money to do the work that you did.

The work that you performed has no relation to the startup failing so its failure should simply remain a footnote.