"Crucial Combo" sounds like a special lunch offer at a fast-food joint, but according to financial analysts at RBC Capital Markets it's the recipe for a special class of tech stock. 

RBC Capital Markets likes to use a metric called Crucial Combo when evaluating company stocks — and it says those with high scores are proving to be some of the most resilient stocks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Crucial Combo scores are calculated by simply combining the company's revenue growth and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) margin each quarter.

In a note published on Thursday, RBC shared the Crucial Combo scores for the 17 largest tech company stocks it follows. Based on this metric, 9 of the following companies are expected to have a positive score from their upcoming second quarter earnings results: Alibaba, eBay, Akamai, Shopify, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Google, and Spotify.

Audiences are catching on to how good Netflix's sci-fi series "Dark" is in its final season, as the series surged up the demand carts this week. 

Every week, Parrot Analytics provides Business Insider with a list of the nine most in-demand TV shows on streaming services in the US.

The data is based on "demand expressions," Parrot Analytics' globally standardized TV-demand measurement unit. Audience demand reflects the desire, engagement, and viewership weighted by importance. The list is ranked by how much more in demand the top series are than the average TV show in the US.

More than a year after season three debuted last July, Netflix's "Stranger Things" is the top series in the US and has rarely given up that title in that time period.

Below are this week's nine most popular original shows on Netflix and other streaming services:

Last week in China, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revisited his enthusiasm for the carmaker's prospects of delivering fully-autonomous vehicles, and soon.

"I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year," he said, as reported by Bloomberg.

"I think there are no fundamental challenges remaining for level five autonomy. There are many small problems, and then there's the challenge of solving all those small problems and then putting the whole system together, and just keep addressing the long tail of problems."

"Level five" is industry terminology for vehicles that can drive themselves with no human interaction. The conventional wisdom is that there are no true level five vehicles yet. Even Tesla's main competitors in this space, Waymo and Cruise (the former is part of Alphabet, and the latter is affiliated with General Motors), admit that they have a long, long way to go before they can completely take the driver out of the picture.

Is Musk justified in being so confident? Skeptics say no way. While Waymo has been working on autonomy for over a decade, going back to the original "Google Car" project, and Cruise started out as a dedicated self-driving company before GM acquired it in 2016, Tesla has been adding its own autonomous tech while thus far delivering mainly advanced cruise control to customers.

On top of all that, Tesla's approach to self-driving is radically different from Waymo's, Cruise's, and others in the burgeoning area. 

Here's what it's all about, plus a rundown of its advantages and drawbacks:

Architects Massimo Gnocchi and Paolo Danesi started The Mountain Refuge to deliver their concept for a tiny, modular cabin at affordable prices around the world. 

The startup is working towards finding a balance between sustainability and design. The architects told Business Insider that they are actively looking for partnerships with prefab construction companies in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to manufacture the cabin on a large scale. They say that they already consider the project a success based on requests and inquiries coming in, and they plan to design more tiny homes in the future.

The tiny cabin with wood finishes and a front deck looks rustic at first, but the slanted roof and minimalist interior give it a modern look, too. It can be hooked up to utilities, or used for an off-grid lifestyle, with some minor adjustments.

See inside. 

The coronavirus pandemic has forced even those most resistant to digital change to give ground, and e-commerce is burgeoning like never before.

Trapped at home, or faced with hours waiting only to find empty shelves, more people than ever are turning to online grocery shopping.

"There is pretty strong evidence that that is here to stay," Luke Jensen, executive director of the Ocado Group and CEO of Ocado Solutions, told Business Insider.

Ocado is a household name in British cities, but its business is largely unknown elsewhere.

A British success story

The company's work is twofold. There is Ocado Retail, which sells groceries and other supermarket products to consumers online. The second aspect is Ocado Solutions, which provides technology to the online operations of major global supermarkets like Kroger in the US, Sobeys in Canada, and Waitrose in the UK.

The company, which was founded in 2002, does not expect to turn a profit until 2024. It has high running costs, a sky-high share price, and a price-to-earnings ratio to match. 

In short, it's now acting like less an online retailer and more like a tech giant.

Its share price hit a record £22.36 ($28) on June 1, and the company has turned out to be the best performing stock on the FTSE 100 in the second quarter of 2020, boasting a 66% rise.

Ocado first set out as an online grocer, boxing and delivering orders for Waitrose, the UK's deluxe supermarket. But it has now established itself as the guardian of online grocery delivery in its own right.

It now has operations in the US, Canada, Britain, Sweden, France, and Japan.

The pandemic has wreaked havoc on many industries, and businesses around the world are struggling to stay afloat. National economies are sliding into recession, as global unemployment rates are inching upward.

But Ocado, and the grocery sector at large, have found themselves booming in light of astronomical demand. 

The future of food is online

The pandemic has left companies around the world reassessing how the habits of their customers will change. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in grocery shopping.

"When you see people try grocery online for the first time, there's a high proportion of people who stick with it and make it part of their repertoire," Jensen said.

There are many signs that online grocery shopping is growing.

Online grocery sales in the US boomed to $7 billion in May 2020, up from $5.3 billion in April, according to a Brick Meets Click/Mercatus Grocery Shopping survey. For reference, this number was $1.2 billion in August 2019.

A 2018 Nielsen study also predicted that 70% of US consumers would be grocery shopping online by 2024.

Before the pandemic, online grocery shopping made up only 4% of the US market, but that is set to change.

"The US has seen an enormous boom," Jensen told Business Insider. "We expect a lot of that to stick."

Back in the UK — where, pre-pandemic, 7% of grocery shopping was online — Ocado said in May that "a simply staggering amount of traffic" meant they had to turn away new customers. 

"They could be doing even better than they are because they deliberately limited their growth," Matt Botham, a strategic insight director at the Kantar data consultancy, told Business Insider.

The elevated demand for online grocery shopping won't last forever. Shops will reopen, and constraints on freedom of movement will end.

But what is expected to remain — and what Ocado is betting its bottom dollar on — is the knowledge that online grocery shopping is possible, and may even be preferable.

'The share price is what it is, but we're not going to ... go all Elon Musk'

"Ocado has been absolutely smashing it during lockdown," Fawad Razaqzada, a financial market analyst, told Business Insider. 

Daniel Coatsworth, the editor of the Shares financial-news magazine, also told Business Insider: "Any grocery company with either an inferior service, or without one at all, will be seriously looking at how they can up their game. And that's where Ocado's strengths lie."

"It's easy to see why Ocado has done so well on the stock market this year."

But as a result of Ocado's extraordinary rise, some wonder whether the company is overvalued.

Ocado's price-to-earnings ratio — how many years of annual earnings it would take to make up its valuation — is way higher than its competitors, a common trait of tech stocks. 

"The share price is what it is, but we're not going to worry about it and go all Elon Musk," Jensen said, referring to the view taken by the Tesla CEO that investors are overvaluing his company. 

"We're delighted the world is seeing that opportunity, and we're embracing it vigorously and going after it.

On June 11, Ocado announced it was raising £1 billion ($1.24 billion) from investors to expand its services.

"The opportunity for Ocado is massive in what we do," Jensen said. "There will then will be opportunities beyond what we do."

Grocer or tech firm?

Ocado's cash cow is not its grocery business, but in its technology.

The company owns hundreds of patents for the machinery and software that power its warehouses, from product-picking robots to item scanners that members of staff can wear on their heads.

This software, and future products, can be leased to supermarkets across the world. That's where Ocado's value lies.

"Investors bidding up Ocado's shares are effectively saying that its services as a provider of solutions to automate online grocery orders will be in greater demand," Coatsworth said.

"There is merit in the market valuing it as a technology stock rather than as simply a grocer or delivery business."

The future of online grocery shopping

"At the heart of it all," Ocado says on its website, "lies our technological know-how and unparalleled IP."

This stands for intellectual property — one of the most lucrative assets a tech company can own.

Ocado has registered at least 350 patent applications in Europe alone, according to IP law firm Reddie and Grosse.

Half concern "storing articles, individually or in orderly arrangement, in warehouses," the firm said. Dozens entail "systems and methods ... relating to logistics."

Coming to America

Nowhere has online grocery shopping boom been more apparent than in the US.

Americans weren't big on online grocery shopping before the pandemic, with it making up just 4% of the total market.

Kroger, the largest US grocer, appears keen to get a head start.

It struck an exclusive partnership with Ocado 2018, and the companies already have plans to develop 20 distribution centers across the country.

They have broken ground on three so far, with the locations of six more confirmed. 

Smart warehouses are underway in Monroe, Ohio, where Kroger is a mainstay, and Groveland, Florida, where rivals — Publix and Target — rule the roost.

"We see plenty of evidence that what we will be able to develop with Kroger will be able to push on quite an open door in terms of consumer demand," Jensen told Business Insider.

No mean feat

But getting Americans to shop for groceries online isn't as simple as it sounds. There has been a traditional reluctance to purchase fresh food online because people want to see what they are going to put in their mouths before they buy it.

At an Amazon Fresh distribution warehouse in Washington state, a third of bananas were thrown out because each banana had to be perfect to the naked eye, an MIT study found in 2015.

A 2014 Instacart training video seen by Quartz told its fruit pickers to "make sure there are no bruises, no cuts, no mold, it's not too soft, not too hard, just perfectly ripe."

And as consulting firm Oliver Wyman wrote in 2019: "Customers resist the idea of having someone else pick fresh food for their family."

The boom in online shopping during the pandemic could be a flash in the pan, rather than an inflection point for the industry. 

Another orthodoxy about online grocery shopping is that the US is just too big to cover with online delivery.

Ocado is less concerned about the challenge, however. Jensen concedes that the US is huge, but said "if you look at the distribution of the population in the US, you have about 75% of the population who live in urban or related-to-urban markets."

"In that respect the US is not terribly dissimilar from any other geography around the world."

Worldwide, Ocado has partnered with Kroger in the US, Sobeys in Canada, Aeon in Japan, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer in the UK, Groupe Casino in France, and ICA in Sweden.

In Japan, online grocery sales doubled during its coronavirus lockdown, which is remarkable for a country that obsesses over fresh produce and food presentation.

As Ocado proclaimed in its 2019 report: "We can change the way the world shops."

Leading the field at the right time

Coatsworth, the editor of Shares magazine, said: "What the market hasn't priced in is the likelihood of increased competition. If the opportunity is so clear for everyone to see, there will inevitably be other players entering the scene."

Several competitors already exist, especially in the US.

The main ones are Amazon Fresh and Instacart. Fresh Direct and Shipt, which is owned by Target, are also in the game.

Amazon has tried to get online vegetable and fruit delivery to stick for some years, but with little to no success.

When asked about the company, Jensen said it has been fascinating to watch.

"What's interesting with Amazon is they've been in grocery for over 10 years now and they've made multiple attempts at particularly getting into the fresh grocery market, and today their market share remains very, very small," he said.

"I think what that indicates is not that Amazon is not good at doing stuff, it indicates just how difficult and different grocery is."

'We don't do vanity tech projects'

The Ocado vans that ferry food from warehouses to homes still bear the slogan "the online supermarket," but the company is essentially a tech company. (It successfully applied to be un-designated as a grocer by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority in 2019.)

Nowhere has Ocado's performance as been more apparent than at its warehouses.

Inside these warehouses, known as Customer Fulfilment Centres, cuboid "Bots" whizz back, forth, and side to side on grids known as "The Hive," depositing supermarket produce from orders.

A 50-item order can be sorted by a bot, which travels through The Hive at a speed of eight meters per second, and is complete in a matter of minutes.

Ocado is also transitioning from a reliance on human produce-pickers to robots. 

"As we continue, we will see a greater proportion of the range picked robotically," said Jensen. He envisions "a tipping point where you get a payback with the cost of a robotic picking station versus the cost of a year of labor."

"We don't do vanity tech projects," Jensen said. "We do projects because they work and they pay back."

Here's what an Ocado warehouse in Andover, England, looked like in 2018:

Ocado has also invested in vertical farming, billed as a more sustainable and profitable way of growing vegetables indoors. 

He sees Ocado's warehouses ultimately being built alongside vertical farm facilities, which would dramatically lower costs and speed up deliveries of fruit and vegetables.

Botham, of Kantar, told Business Insider that the days of Ocado being a retailer are long gone.

"They see themselves as a solutions business," he said. "That's where they think their money is." 

In an uncertain economy where valuations are slipping, the 20 highest-valued venture-backed companies in artificial intelligence combined are worth about a staggering $120 billion, according to PitchBook, in a reflection of the promising innovation of the sector.

To put it in perspective, these 20 young companies — many that have yet to produce actual products — are worth more than Ford, American Express, and US Steel combined. 

Top startups also continue to close major fundraising rounds and command multi-billion valuations for technology ranging from automation tools to self-driving cars. And despite the economic headwinds caused by the coronavirus pandemic, expert studies and venture capitalists say the market remains steady. 

"All the fundamental parts of the innovation cycle that have AI broadly employed in it are somewhat untouched by a COVID-like pandemic scenario," said Rohit Sharma, a partner at early stage VC firm True Ventures. "We don't really see a slowdown or any kind of impact." 

But there are obstacles ahead for even the most valuable startups. Seven of the 20 top, according to data provided by PitchBook, are builders of self-driving car technology, which experts say is a sector that demands capital and patience — two things that could be in shorter supply in a jittery recession. 

"A lot of the business case assumptions and model assumptions, historically, have started to fall apart as people really started to realize just how challenging this robo-taxi problem really is," Austin Russell, CEO of Luminar, told Business Insider's Troy Wolverton recently. 

Most of the companies on this list are relatively small, independently-held startups.

Notably, however, a few of the companies on PitchBook's list are independent subsidiaries of larger organizations — at the top of the list is Waymo, which began as Google's self-driving car unit, and is now reportedly mulling a public offering at some point in the future after raising venture cash all its own.

Joining Waymo is Uber's own autonomous vehicle division – a separate entity from the ride-sharing firm with its own CEO and IPO possibilities. And Zoox may be the poster child for how challenging the market can be. Amazon reportedly bought the firm for far less than its previous valuation. 

Beyond the parking lot of autonomous cars are a variety of interesting companies, all using the tech in different ways. The one thing they have in common, however, is they are backed by wealth many other of tech would  envy.

Big-data company Palantir is beginning the process to go public. Other standouts on the list include AI farming startup Indigo Ag, hiring firm Checkr, and AI writing company Grammarly. 

All valuation data is from PitchBook. All companies asked to verify valuation, and where they did it is noted. 

Business Insider unpacked the top 20 most valuable, VC-backed AI companies below:

Peter Rawlinson worked for Tesla CEO Elon Musk from 2009-2012 as he led the development of the electric-car maker's groundbreaking Model S sedan. Now the chief executive of the electric-vehicle startup Lucid Motors, Rawlinson learned from Musk the importance of relentless optimism.

"I really believe that success can beget success," Rawlinson said in an interview with Business Insider. "It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy if you're really committed and you're all in, and everyone at Lucid knows I am. And that's the leadership I hope I provide."

If you focus too much on what might go wrong, it can decrease your odds of achieving your goals, he added.

"Sometimes you have to put all your chips in," he said.

Musk, Rawlinson said, demonstrated his commitment to success "on an hour-by-hour basis." Rawlinson has taken that attitude to Lucid, which he joined in 2013 (he became the company's CEO in 2019). His confidence in the company and its debut vehicle, the Air luxury sedan, is driven by Lucid's in-house engineering and design efforts. According to the company, the Air will be able to drive over 400 miles between charges and accelerate from 0-60 mph in under 2.5 seconds. Those specs would make the Air competitive with the Model S, which, depending on the trim, has a maximum range of 402 miles and a 2.3-second 0-60 mph time.

"We're creating a car which is going to be the best car in the world," Rawlinson said. "People are going to want it."

Lucid will unveil the production version of the Air in September before beginning production next year. The vehicle's price will start "well north" of $100,000, Rawlinson said.

Are you a current or former Lucid employee? Do you have an opinion about what it's like to work there? Contact this reporter at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., on Signal at 646-768-4712, or via his encrypted email address This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Eight360, a startup in Wellington, New Zealand has a way of tricking your brain into thinking you're driving a racecar, riding a rollercoaster, or even flying a jet.

The company's VR motion simulator, NOVA, can turn 180 degrees in any direction in only one second, combining visual, audio, and physical elements to make the experience as realistic as possible. Eight360 even says that this scary-looking contraption makes motion sickness less of a problem, because it matches up what the user is seeing to what they're feeling.

At $150,000 per year for a lease, the Nova probably isn't going to show up in many homes, though it could become standard in esports lounges. Instead, Eight360 is promoting the device as a way for racecar drivers to put in extra practice time off the track, or to practice esports, and for military training for pilots.

Here's how it works. 

At the halfway point of every year, I like to pause for a moment and reflect on all the vehicles I've driven, savor the great experiences and roadway thrills and ... amass a list of complaints!

Actually, I usually do this at the end of the year, but in 2020 I've decided to up my timetable. Part of this is because I've gotten behind the wheel of A LOT of cars at this point. 

A caveat: These days, most cars are wonderful, at least compared to the dreadful sets of wheels that we routinely had to deal with in past eras. The auto industry has done a very good job of giving customers what they want and improving reliability and performance.

But there are still some fails. 

Here's a rundown of everything that's annoyed me so far:

I was going to take a week off the grid next week, but I’ve got a bunch of podcasts and media recordings to do for my upcoming book The Startup Community Way. I also want to continue spending time in the new Startup Community community, which now has over 2,000 people in it and is growing and self-organizing at a rapid clip. And I have a few Foundry things to do.

So I’m going to try something I’ve never done before. I’m going to have a No Scheduled Meeting week. The recordings are on my calendar, but nothing else is.

When I ponder this, it amazes me that I’ve never tried this before. I often feel oppressed by my calendar and I’ve tried lots of different approaches to managing it. However, I’ve never had a week of no scheduled meetings.

Rather than take a week off the grid, I’ll work all week. It’ll just be almost entirely unscheduled work. I have no idea how it will go, but that’s the nature of endless small experiments.

Peace sees this as the next step in the evolution of benefits offerings for employees. He traces its legacy to the development of private health insurance and 401k retirement plans. “After another 40 years lifestyle benefits are the newest breakthrough — and like its predecessors, will be almost universally adopted in the next 5 years,” Peace wrote.

Unpacking the nCino and GoHealth IPO filings