It's not just that technology builds upon technology, but that it does so in specific cultural and historical contexts. Technologies are created to serve the needs of a given society.

The "everything has to start with a natural resource" is a bad way to think about technology.

To develop modern electronics, for example, there are some resources involved, yes. Some rare earth elements, some wiring, some acids.

But what makes these things applicable is the context in which they are in. This can include the intellectual context. So to develop the transistor required not only knowledge of how electricity works, but advanced theories of solid-state physics. To think this was something worth doing required an understanding of boolean logic as applied to circuits, which required a whole lot of other things as well.

The chain that connects these things is not that they are derived from "natural resources" which is just an empty way of saying that everything is made of "stuff" and ultimately all "stuff" is derived from other "stuff." Indeed, we do not and cannot make matter from nothing, but this is not a good way to think about technology.

There is some aspect of compounding technologies, yes, but it's not just the technologies that drive this — it's a lot of other things that make people think, "oh, wouldn't it be nice if we could make this...", and that's an entirely more complicated set of factors (social, economic, political, theological, ideological, personal, etc.).