Sands: Stripe passed on Tecton, co-building Cronon with Airbnb for latency
Emily Glassberg Sands · The Agents Economy Backbone - with Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe · Oct 30, 2025 · at 1:14:32
Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe, explains how strict latency and reliability requirements on the core payment processing path forced Stripe to co-build internal infrastructure.
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“We evaluated Tekton. This was a couple of years ago now. At the time, we couldn't wrap our heads around using it on the charge path, just from like a latency and reliability perspective. Like we've got to be operating at six nines. We got to be like, Decisioning in, you know, tens of milliseconds for some of these models. Like, we just, we can't reason about that on the charge path. We ended up pairing up with Airbnb and building we call it Shepard internally, but it's open sourced under the name Cronon.”
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