By default, VoiceAttack will start with whatever the listening state was when it was last shut down cleanly.
There is no setting for explicitly specifying the listening state, however if you have the "Recognition Global Hotkey" option enabled on the "Hotkeys" tab of the VoiceAttack options window and set to "VoiceAttack listens while keys are down", the listening state will be off when VoiceAttack starts regardless of the previous state.
If your intent is to instead manually change the listening state using the "Toggle listening start / stop" setting of the "Recognition Global Hotkey" option, you'd need to change the listening state on startup using another method.
Provided you're using a desktop shortcut to launch VoiceAttack, you could add the "-listeningoff" parameter after the target path, which would instruct VoiceAttack to disable listening when it starts.
If you're having VoiceAttack start with Windows instead, you could use a command in your profile that's executed using the "Execute a command each time this profile is loaded" option and uses the "Make VoiceAttack Stop Listening" action, though that would be specific to that profile and need to be repeated in other profiles (as only the active profile runs a command when it's loaded; global or included profiles don't)
Lastly, if none of the other options a feasible, a plugin can also change the listening state, and could do so on startup regardless of the active profile