Peter Marsh Talks Flywheel, Founders, and Grit in TALK Greenville

Flywheel founding partner Peter Marsh is featured in the November 2026 issue of TALK Greenville, in the magazine’s “15 Minutes With” column. In a conversation with writer Leanne Cobb, Peter talked about why Flywheel was built differently from a typical coworking space, how community helps startups grow, and what he’s noticed about the founders who make it.

Here are a few highlights. You can read the full interview at TALK Greenville.

Why Flywheel Exists
Flywheel develops, designs, and operates coworking centers, and it’s intentional about where. The model targets smaller cities with a strong concentration of colleges and universities (community colleges included) and an established network of organizations that support entrepreneurs.
Peter points out that Greenville already has plenty of coworking options, but many follow an older model: a shared print room, a break room, and not much else. There’s little intention behind helping people meet or share what they know.

Flywheel was built to fill that gap. The goal is to put startups on a growth trajectory through collaboration with other founders, business programming, access to capital, shared resources, and pricing a new company can actually manage.

Community Is the Strategy
At the center of Flywheel is a simple idea: entrepreneurs learn more from each other than they do working alone. Working from home by yourself can be lonely and can even hold you back, so Flywheel brings founders under one roof and designs both the space and the programming to get them talking.

That reaches well past our own members. Peter counts 30 entrepreneurship organizations working in the region, and Flywheel collaborates with all of them, inviting them to use our conference center and hosting a steady stream of business education programming.

The building itself was designed for that. It can host very large events, with smaller conference and breakout rooms to support them, and the layout reflects years of learning about how a physical space gets people interacting.

Built to Stay Affordable
Flywheel supports founders through membership, and members tailor it to the kind of business they run and the support they need. Peter told TALK that renting a fully furnished office with the same services and amenities on the open market would likely cost 50 to 100 percent more. Sharing resources is what closes that gap.

Keeping costs down starts with real estate. Flywheel buys lower-cost buildings, renovates them, and deliberately locates in opportunity zones: former commercial and industrial districts ready to serve a new purpose.

Our Greenville location sits just off Poinsett Highway, an area Peter sees as ready for redevelopment. Flywheel is often one of the first new sources of economic energy in places like this, and as startups here grow, many will stay nearby and help strengthen and diversify the local economy.

What New Founders Need
Peter sees the same four needs come up again and again with early-stage founders:

• An affordable place to work
• A community of other founders to learn tools, techniques, and best practices from
• Mentors, which Flywheel provides through several mentoring services and subject matter experts in market research, sales, financials, and marketing
• Access to capital, from state and federal grants and equity investment to SBA and bank loans, all the way up to institutional financing

What Separates the Startups That Thrive
Asked what separates thriving startups from the ones that stall, Peter joked that if he could answer that accurately, he’d be a very rich man. He did share a few patterns he’s seen.

Founders do best when their skills match the size of their ambitions. If you plan to raise venture capital and build a large company, you need to be comfortable with financial modeling and market analytics, and you need to know how to run and lead an organization.

No one is great at every part of that, so self-awareness matters too. Knowing your strengths tells you when to hire smart people who cover what you’re not good at.

Above all, Peter pointed to grit. “There is no ‘easy’ button in entrepreneurship,” he said. Startups never have enough money, time, or people, and tenacity and passion for the vision are what carry founders through the hard stretches.

Read the Full Interview
Pick up the November issue of TALK Greenville or read the full conversation at talkgreenville.com.
If you’re building something and want to be around people doing the same, we’d love to show you around. Book a tour of Flywheel.