Jobster made a 180 degree turn in its strategic course this evening, launching a free job listing service to compete head on with Monster.com and others. I wrote about the Jobster changes on TechCrunch earlier this evening.

It turns out that a long conversation I had last year with Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg led partially to this new strategy. Jason wrote about our discussion in a blog post tonight. I like Jason and enjoyed our conversation. He’s a combination of two types of CEO - the take no prisoners, kill ‘em all type CEO and the thoughtful, let’s get the consensus of the exec team type CEO. I’ve never seen it in one person before. The guy is strong willed, but very open to the opinions of others.

As I’ve said before (and Jason has blogged this as well), I’m a loud mouthed blogger who considers himself an expert on whatever is coming out of my mouth at the moment. I dispense advice early and often, and am sometimes dogmatic in my approach to “discussion.” It’s a good formula for blogging, but I don’t take myself too seriously. The best entrepreneurs don’t ask for my advice, and tend to ignore it when I give it anyway. If they listened to everyone with an opinion, they would have stayed at their old job and never left the security of a steady salary, health benefits and stock options. Entrepreneurs are crazy, almost by definition. They attach utility to risk, which doesn’t make any sense.

So I was surprised to see Jobster change their core business model and go “disruptive” as Jason puts it. It’s bold and risky. I’m going to sit on the sidelines and cheer him on, with nothing to lose but my pride if it fails. But the Jobster team is putting their capital and time behind this, and going hard after a very large and very lucrative market. If they win, they win big. I can’t wait to see the rest of this movie.