In February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg famously launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room at the age of 19. By that summer, Zuckerberg moved himself and the company to Silicon Valley and never looked back.

Over the next eight years, Facebook would attract half a billion users and nearly $7 billion in venture capital investment, on its way to a May 2012 IPO that valued the company at more than $81 billion. Today, Facebook has more than one billion users and is worth more than $500 billion. Zuckerberg is still CEO, and at 35 years old, has an estimated net worth of $65 billion—making him the eighth richest person in the world.

It’s a fascinating story. So fascinating in fact that Hollywood made a feature film about it called The Social Network. And while the story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook has undoubtedly inspired an entire generation of young entrepreneurs and reshaped their imaginations about what’s possible, people too easily forget that a big part of what makes the story compelling is that it’s so unusual. Mark Zuckerburg is not only an outlier—he’s an outlier among outliers.