How many failures have you had by age 30?

Already seen people do this regardless of age. Happens everyday.

CRE

Do you know what's better than failing? Succeeding.

When you fail at building the "uber of dating apps" or whatever, you just have to live in your parent's basement another 6 months. When you fail at real estate, you lose people's money and most likely your own money. Try not to do this before you're 25-30.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a successful real estate principal who hasn't failed at some point.  I'd argue it's way better to fail early, when you can learn from your mistake, rather than later on.  Think about people who hit an up market at the right time and make the same mistakes over and over, compounding their error but always getting bailed out by a rising tide?  Eventually they go bust and they take tens of millions of dollars with them instead of a few hundred thousand.

I've got a couple side projects going on.  The first one I did was a very small MF building (under ten units) and we fucked up everything.  Didn't expand our opex enough versus what we'd underwrite in our day jobs to account for lower economies of scale.  Were too aggressive with unit turnover and rent increases.  Got unlucky with a ridiculous lawsuit.  Hit the NYC multifamily market right as it started to cool off in terms of deregulating apartments, then got hit with the new rent laws.  Had to clean up some violations that we hadn't found in our diligence which took time and money.  In almost every possible way, we blew it, and then it was all compounded by a market that was rapidly cooling off.  Ended up losing our investors like ~100k.  It really, really sucked.  Lot of time and money down the drain for me.  I suppose I can only say this because I survived it and moved on to other projects, but I couldn't be happier about it.  We've done a handful of other deals, which are relatively larger (10-50 units), and we're either doing alright (no way to skirt around losing 10-20% value because of a rent law no one saw coming) or killing it because of what we learned on that first project.

You know what would have sucked?  Buying that first deal 3 years earlier, making all the wrong mistakes like we did, but not realizing it because the NYC outer borough market was appreciating at such an insane pace that no one was losing money, no matter what.  Instead of having a few hundred thousand of equity tied up, we'd have millions of investor capital at risk and we still would have gotten fucked over by the market turning, and all those mistakes we made, would have been made on everything else, and that kind of loss is one where you don't just say "oops, our bad" and move on to the next one.

No offense, but I think your real failure might be not realizing that you lost it on bad luck and getting it back on good luck.