People want to see how well you play the cards that you're dealt. If you can make something happen starting from nothing, then they figure that once they give you some cards to play with, you'll do even better from that. If you can't make something happen with limited resources, what makes you think that more resources will magically fix things?

This applies to a lot of other things as well - most of the time, when you start at a new job you have to start small, because people who control the resources want to see that you can work effectively on a small project before they give you a big mission-critical project. I've seen people get hired into Google at T4 (nowadays, virtually everybody is hired into T4 or below) and then work their way up to T9 because every time they're given a more ambitious challenge they master it in short order.