A folklore result in arithmetic complexity shows that the number of multiplications required to compute some $n$-variate polynomial of degree $d$ is $\sqrt{{n+d \choose n}}$. We complement this by an almost matching upper bound, showing that any $n$-variate polynomial of degree $d$ over any field can be computed with only $\sqrt{{n+d \choose n}} \cdot (nd)^{O(1)}$ multiplications.