For anyone interested, the book "Dreaming in Code" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code) had this sort of idea as a central thread--one of the main failures of the Chandler project seemed to be that, armed with adequate funding, development lost track of reality and sprawled into some degree of failure.
Contrast with, say, "Masters of Doom" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom) where the early id software team was so pressed for cash that they would "borrow" their employer's workstations during evenings to write their code. That's what I would consider "scrappy".
Even more to the point, and I should add this to the article, there are guys out there who have already spent 10, 20, 30K or more -- and can't even empirically demonstrate making something one person wants. (And I'm sticking to off-the-shelf, low-end products that most of the HN crowd might be tempted by. Let's not even start in on the custom, high-end marketing plans and such. Very painful.)
But they can tell you a lot of stories about how all the stuff they bought is going to help them bring in millions.
Contrast with, say, "Masters of Doom" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom) where the early id software team was so pressed for cash that they would "borrow" their employer's workstations during evenings to write their code. That's what I would consider "scrappy".