Distributed teams work when the company, its culture and processes are stable and clear. Most software related companies don't get anywhere near that in the first five to ten years. In the mean time, fast growing start-ups look for the engineers they hire to be their future technical leaders, and to be deeply involved in the entire company, not just writing code.

In short: drinking coffee/beer/koolaid with the rest of the team is of vital importance, even if the actual work can be done remotely.

Also, the people that don't get this aren't good hires for remote work anyway, because one primary skill needed for a remote worker is knowing how to compensate for not being physically present.

I don't know what you qualify as 'hip', but beyond the initial three or four first people in a startup, many startups are more than willing to start hiring remote workers.

This is especially true when you're looking for workers with very specific skill sets. It's generally easy to find a generic Java developer locally, but if you're looking for, say Cassandra experts (like we are at DataStax, with an office in Austin), then you're probably willing to hire someone anywhere in the world if they're good enough.

I get this, as I worked in a startup and saw how many of the early employees started to fill in leadership roles within the company. However, we had remote teams too and they worked out just as well. Our VP of Development for a long time was remote too.

I do agree that it's not optimal in every situation, and your culture has to adjust for it. I'm just saying, if there is a talent crunch, companies need to be willing to take steps to handle it. Distributed teams are one such option.