Article · 8 min read

Your Startup Failed and Now You're Looking for a Job. Here's What to Do.

Jaclyn Robinson · Crunchbase News Free Beginner

This is the tactical playbook for the interview seat: it tells you to lead with the milestones you actually hit, back the story with data, and treat the shutdown as a market read rather than a personal indictment. It maps cleanly onto our three-beat frame (what you set out to prove, what the market said, what you'd do differently) instead of leaving you to improvise under pressure.

• Lead your narrative with concrete wins and milestones you shipped, not the shutdown itself, and have the numbers to back each one
• A failed startup reads as a badge of range (product, sales, growth) if you name the varied skills it forced you to build
• Reverse-engineer what this specific employer values before the interview, then frame your failure story toward the value you can deliver them