Let me break this down a bit: USD 500k at USD 2k/man day = 250 man days

A US man year has ~235 man days, so that's just roughly 1 external FTE for a year. Not so much, actually.

What kind of FTE makes $2000 a day, what?

Consultants. Not freelancers, consultants. They have to charge that much so people know they're consultants rather than freelancers!

Top of my head: Patrick, Thomas and probably a lot of other HN regulars.

Looking besonders technology: lawyers, marketing and branding consultants, and, last but not least, management consultants.

$2000 is not outrageous.

From where i am, it seems exorbitant. Granted here in Africa, $1m is quite a big investment, we have been running on <$10,000 for over 9 months now. Capital is very difficult to get access to. Forces you to be super-lean(and practically starve)

For e.g For our startup we do not have capital for tablets.. so the question becomes how can we get things done without purchasing the tablets. Repurpose the existing devices used by customers or some other way to do things? We came up with hacks that use cloudprint and existing printers, and SMS to cheap handsets (< $10)

That would be a very high fill rate (5 days a week) for such high prices.

I don't think the math implies that it's a single person 5 days a week for a year, in a staff augmentation fashion. It could be e.g. 2 people for a month, then nobody, then 3 people, all at different rates.

Why would you do this? Examples:

* a team to write the Android port(s)

* a Web design team

* QA

* HR

* Legal ($$$$$)

* etc.

All of these will be at different rates. You might outsource parts of the technology to hit your other growth goals.

Essentially part-time specialist employees. Hiring them full-time would have cost a lot more.

this is only a couple contractors for a couple of years. totally reasonable.

also, a lawyer may have taken 10-15% of this all by himself, especially if venture capital is involved.