I would advise never to start with a distributed team. Sure we have the tools & technologies to shorten the distance & the communication-gap, but nothing beats the in-person talk where people can tap on your shoulder to discuss ideas, disagree with you & informally communicate with you. Once you enable the team to take decisions on their own without your active involvement, that would be an appropriate time to go distributed. My learning is that the team has to be decentralised (in decision-making) before it's distributed. Otherwise, founders could end up becoming the bottlenecks in startup's growth.
Please take my opinions with a pinch of salt as I've never been a founder myself, but I was part of a geographically distributed founding-team member of a startup, which got acquired ~3 years ago.