Backstory:
TL;DR: I've gained a lot of experience working for 5 years at one startup company, but it eventually failed. The company is gone and the owner MIA.  
  When I left sixth-form college I
  didn't want to start a degree straight
  away, so when I met this guy who knew
  a guy who was setting up a publishing
  company and needed a 'Techie' I
  thought why not.
  
  It was a very small operation, he sent
  mailings to schools, waited for orders
  to start arriving, then ordered a
  short run of the textbooks to be
  printed, stuck them in an envelope
  posted them out. 
  
  I was initially going to help him set
  up a computerized system for recording
  orders and payments, printing labels,
  really basic stuff and I threw it
  together in Access in a couple of
  weeks. He also wanted to start taking
  orders online, so I set up a website
  and a paypal business account. 
  
  While I was doing this, I was also
  helping to do the day-to-day running
  of things, taking phone orders,
  posting products, banking cheques,
  ordering textbooks, designing
  mailings, filing end of year accounts,
  hiring extra staff, putting stamps on
  envelopes. I learned so much about
  things I didn't even know I needed to
  learn about.
  
  Things were pretty good, when I
  started we sold about £10,000 worth of
  textbooks and by my 4th year there we
  sold £250,000 worth of text books.
  
  Things were looking good, but we had a
  problem. Our best selling product had
  peaked and sales started to fall
  sharply, we introduced add on products
  through the website to boost sales
  which helped for a while, but we had
  simply saturated the market.
  
  Our plan was to enter the US with our
  star product and follow the same,
  slightly modified, plan as before. We
  setup a 1-866 number and had the calls
  forwarded to our UK offices. We
  contracted a fulfillment company,
  shipped over a few thousand textbooks,
  had a mailing printed and mailed, then
  sat by the phones and waited.
  
  Needless to say, it didn't work. We
  tried a few other things, at home and
  in the US, but nothing helped. 
  
  We expanded in the good times, moving
  into bigger offices, taking on staff
  to do administrative and dispatch
  work, but now cashflow was becoming a
  problem and things got tougher. We did
  the only thing we could and scaled
  things right back, the offices went,
  the admin staff went, I stopped taking
  a wage and started working from home.
  
  Nothing helped. The business was wound
  up about about 2 years ago. In the end
  it turned out that the owner had built
  up considerable debt at the start of
  business and had not paid them off
  during good years, which left him in a
  difficult position when cashflow had
  started to dry up.
  
  I haven't been able to contact the
  owner since I found out.
  
  It took me a while to get back on my
  feet after that, but I'm now at
  University and doing a Computer
  Science degree.
How do I show the experience I have without having to get into all the gory details of what happened?