Home   Writing   Archive   Feed

Hello Internet! I’m Armand (B.) Cognetta (III). I’m a scientist interested in all aspects of human health and well-being. I did my PhD in Chemical Biology in the laboratory of Benjamin Cravatt at Scripps Research Institute, where I developed chemo-proteomic platforms to make drug discovery safer and more efficient, made a bunch of cool drugs, and published 20+ research articles and patents including a portion of the foundational IP for two exited biotech co’s.

After defending I joined the Flagship Pioneering start-up Inzen Therapeutics (now Sonata) as one of the first ~five employees, where I built the company’s proteomics drug discovery engine—the first platform enabling global mapping of novel cell death signaling factors.

I left Inzen to go through Y Combinator as a solo-founder to develop the next generation of induced-proximity medicines at General Proximity, where I currently serve as Founder and CEO. GP has been one of the most heavily awarded early biotech company’s in the Bay Area for the promise around our OmniTAC platform’s ability to revolutionize small-molecule/induced-proximity drug discovery.

In my free time I like to read, write, do Type 2 Fun activities, and think about productivity, health + fitness, awakening experiences, and meditation 🙂

More about me here.





You can find me online @:


Some Things I Like:

  • Helping. I believe the best way to “network” is to help others, and that the world would be a better place with more positive sum interactions like this in general. Let me know if there’s something you think I can help you with :)
  • This essay by John Perry Barlow, that I read every year.
  • Reading! Here are my favorite books/series loosely ranked. Recommend more please!
  • Spaced Repetition. I particularly love NeuraCache.
  • Quotations are (often) just instances of compressed reality. They allow you to take complex situations and distill them down into algorithms that are easy to remember, emotionally salient, and useful when applied correctly.
  • Triathlons and other endurance races. I love race camaraderie and training for long-term goals with friends.
  • Roger Federer as Religious Experience is one of the greatest pieces of journalism of all time, and reading it is itself religious experience.
  • Playing Music makes me happy, but I’m not very good and I’m bad at practicing by myself. Getting better at this is one of my main goals for 2020.
  • Meditation.
  • This post from Sasha Chapin about Deep Okayness is my current template for well-being.
  • Fuckarounditis—first read this post 12 years ago and haven’t done a workout without thinking about it since.


Some Things I’m Interested In:

  • Mental Health, especially in academia and graduate school. Graduate students are ~more than six times as likely to experience anxiety and depression as the general population (more here and here). Lots of innovation comes from graduate researchers, so it seems… suboptimal for most of them to be suffering from various mental ailments. I think one of the biggest factors holding back improvement in this area is the lack of good ranking and tracking of mental health for these programs. Imagine how different the situation would look if grad schools had to compete for prospective students who could use some sort of mental health ranking info to discriminate between programs? I’ve written more about this here.
  • Slack, specifically how to engineer more into my life.
  • Habits. It seems like people are much better at encoding habits that have a strong and consistent reward signal versus things which have a weaker signal-to-noise and/or are intermittent, even if the total amount of ‘reward’ is the same in both cases. I’m interested in how mindfulness of our actions can help us link causes to effects – which are real but might not normally be ‘felt’ as an effect of a particular action – and thereby help us make better habits.
  • Deliberate Suffering as a mechanism for growth. I’ve written more about this here and here.


Some Blogs I Like:


Some Quotes I like:

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”

-Sir Terence David John Pratchett

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

“Practice Maximum Enthusiasm.”

-Brendan Leonard

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”

-Rumi

“Stop being holy, forget being prudent, it’ll be a hundred times better for everyone. Stop being altruistic, forget being righteous, people will remember what family feeling is. Stop planning, forget making a profit, there won’t be any thieves and robbers. But even these three rules needn’t be followed; what works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood. Need little, want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled.”

-Lao Tzu, (trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

“The fundamental delusion—there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.”

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

-Aldous Huxley

“And here is a parable of life for you to ponder on: A group of tourists sits in a bus that is passing through gorgeously beautiful country; lakes and mountains and green fields and rivers. But the shades of the bus are pulled down. They do not have the slightest idea of what lies beyond the windows of the bus. And all the time of their journey is spent in squabbling over who will have the seat of honor in the bus, who will be applauded, who will be well considered. And so they remain till the journey’s end.”

-Anthony de Mello

“Whatever feeds the ego kills the soul.”

-Simone Giertz

“We all feel like we have limited time but that’s really not the case. What we have is limited energy.”

-Matt Mochary

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

-Amos Tversky

“Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.”

-Dan Dennett

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.”

-Millard Fuller

“Everything you want is on the far side of hard work.”

-Tim Kennedy

“Most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on. But if you don’t cultivate ‘turning it on’ as a way of life in the little moments–and there are hundreds of times more little moments than big–then there’s no chance in the big moments.
[…]
The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone of showing what we’ve got under pressure, we have to be prepared by a lifestyle of reinforcement. Presence must be like breathing.”

-Josh Waitzkin

“Practice the way as though saving your head from fire.”

-Dogen

“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.”

-Michael Jordan

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”

-Richard Feynman

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

-Bill Gates

“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”

-George Bernard Shaw

“If you have everything under control, you’re not moving fast enough.”

-Mario Andretti

“The first and great commandment is: Don’t let them scare you.”

-Elmer Davis

“Panic at the thought of doing a thing is a challenge to do it.”

-Henry S. Haskins

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”

-Ted Hughes

“A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.”

-Rumi

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

-William James

“If you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.”

-Joseph Goldstein

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.”

-Simone Weil

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

-Carl Jung

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”

-John Cage

“Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful.”

-Vincent Van Gogh

“In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.”

-Blaise Pascal

“Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.”

-Linus Pauling

“The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.”

-Michel de Montaigne

“Live life as if everything is rigged in your favor.”

-Rumi

“And one morning before dawn on a hot day in July, without informing a single person of his intentions, and without anyone seeing him, he armored himself with all his armor and mounted Rocinante, wearing his poorly constructed helmet, and he grasped his shield and took up his lance and through the side door of a corral he rode out into the countryside with great joy and delight at seeing how easily he had given a beginning to his virtuous desire.”

-Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra

“We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.”

-Thích Nhất Hạnh

“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

-Steve Jobs

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…”

-Ursula K. Le Guin

“Make a lot of mistakes in your life. And the earlier you make them the more useful they will be to you.”

-Patrick Rothfuss

“I only want power so I can get books.”

-Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality


Miscellany: