Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tel Aviv was founded on the 11th of April 1909, when 66 Jewish families gathered on a sand dune north of Jaffa to allocate land by lottery using seashells. The lottery was organized by Akiva Aryeh Weiss, president of the Ahuzat Bayit building society, which had formed in 1906 to create a modern Hebrew urban center.
Tel Aviv is a Hebrew name combining aviv (spring, symbolizing renewal) and tel (an artificial mound formed by centuries of accumulated civilization). The name was adopted on the 21st of May 1910 from Nahum Sokolow's Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl's 1902 novel Altneuland, where Sokolow drew the term from a place mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel.
Tel Aviv's White City is the world's largest concentration of buildings in the International Style, including Bauhaus and related modernist designs. Around 3,000 buildings were constructed in this style between 1931 and 1939 by German Jewish architects, many trained at the Bauhaus, who came to Palestine after the rise of the Nazis. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site in 2003.
When the Israeli government relocated to Jerusalem in December 1949, most embassies stayed in or near Tel Aviv because of the international dispute over Jerusalem's status. In the early 1980s, an additional 13 embassies moved from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv following Israel's 1980 Jerusalem Law.
Tel Aviv's population fell from a peak of about 390,000 in the early 1960s to 317,000 in the late 1980s as high property prices drove families to neighboring cities. Recovery began when the city absorbed 42,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, many with scientific and technical training, doubling the city's number of engineers and catalyzing a high-tech boom. By 2012, the city held a AAA+ credit rating and was running a budget surplus.
Tel Aviv is ranked the 4th top global startup ecosystem hub. In December 2012 it was ranked second globally for founding high-tech startups, just behind Silicon Valley, and in 2013 the city had more than 700 startup companies and research and development centers. The broader metropolitan area, sometimes called Silicon Wadi, is Israel's center for high-tech industry.